The Bank of Portugal Named Its Third Unlicensed Lender in Nine Days on Friday, and This One Takes Its Applications Through a Facebook Page

The Bank of Portugal published a warning on Friday against two trading names it says are offering credit in Portugal without being allowed to: "Financeira Zona" and "XNET BANCO". It is the third such warning about lending in nine days, and the fifth warning of any kind about unauthorised financial operators in that window.

The regulator names the channels rather than a company. The pair operate, it says, through the website xnetbanco.com, a Facebook page called "Financeira Zona" and the email address [email protected]. None of that carries any authorisation to grant credit in Portugal, or to carry on any other financial activity reserved to institutions under the Bank's supervision.

What the ban actually rests on

The legal basis is narrow and old. Granting credit is listed in article 4(1)(b) of the Regime Geral das Instituições de Crédito e Sociedades Financeiras (General Regime for Credit Institutions and Financial Companies), approved by Decreto-Lei n.º 298/92 of 31 December. Article 10 of the same regime reserves that activity to entities legally authorised to carry it out. Anyone else offering a loan in Portugal is outside the law, whatever their website says.

That matters more than it sounds. An unlicensed lender is not a regulated counterparty gone wrong: it sits outside the whole supervisory structure, which means no conduct rules, no complaint route through the Bank, and no recourse to the Fundo de Garantia de Depósitos (Deposit Guarantee Fund) if money is handed over. The Bank's standard remedy is the same every time, and it is a list. It also tightened its advertising rules for supervised lenders this week, which is a reminder that the firms it can reach are the ones already inside the perimeter. The entities cleared to lend are published on bportugal.pt, alongside separate registers of authorised credit intermediaries and of firms permitted to advise on credit agreements.

Five warnings in nine days

Friday's notice is not an isolated one. On 10 September the Bank named an operator trading as "Formiga Crédito" and "Formiga Crédit" through formiga-pt.com, which it said was not authorised to grant credit, to act as a credit intermediary or to advise on credit agreements. On 16 September it warned against BANCO LUZ, operating through bancoluz.com, over both deposit-taking and lending. The same day it issued two further notices, this time about payment services, naming two individuals.

Read together, the run says something about where the problem has moved. Four of the five warnings point at a website, and one at a Facebook page. There is no branch and no shopfront to inspect; the enforcement tool is publication, and the defence available to a borrower is to check a register before signing anything.

A pattern our readers have seen before

The Bank named two other unlicensed operators in August, in the same week the tax authority extended its own fraud warning to cover telephone calls. The securities regulator, the CMVM, told investors at the start of September that scam approaches now arrive with AI-generated video, and that it never contacts anyone through WhatsApp. In June the Bank floated a national blacklist of bank accounts used in payment fraud as part of its 2030 retail payments strategy.

For foreign residents the exposure is sharper than for Portuguese borrowers, because the sites that surface in an English-language search for a loan in Portugal are rarely the supervised ones, and because a newcomer has no instinct for which names are real. The check is free and takes a minute: if the lender is not on the Bank of Portugal's published list of authorised institutions, it cannot lawfully lend here, and the attractive terms on the page are the least of the problems.