Financial Terrorism The Wonga Payday Lending Experiment Resource Type: Article Published: 2014 Keeping people poor in a world of seedy abandonment. Borrowing at phenomenal rates. Loan sharks running wild, dressed by the language of assistance and salvation. All of this should be the stuff to be binned and repelled by governments, but in an age when governments forfeit, rather than affirm responsibility in the face of the economy, the phenomenon of Wonga, a deferred deposit loan operator, has come to thrive. Private indebtedness has become both a condition and a lifestyle.