Home > Moneysupermarket.com - Exposed!
Moneysupermarket.com - Exposed!
Moneysupermarket.com are lying about the number of loans they compare, and use underhand tactics to mislead people looking for loans.
According to its site and advertising, Moneysupermarket.com claims to "compare all UK cheapest loans" and "get the lowest loan rates". To see if that was true, we ran a test pitting Loanpages.com loan search against Moneysupermarket.com.
First, we ran a £5,000 search through Moneysupermarket.com - they had 7 loans available for £5,000, with the cheapest one available coming from First Direct at 11.9% and £95.93 a month for 6 years.
We then ran the same search on Loanpages.com, which returned 39 available loans for £5,000 (as well as 58 other suitable loans for different amounts) with the cheapest one coming in at 7.5%. So that's 32 more loan options for £5,000.
Off the back of this test alone, it's fair to say that Moneysupermarket.com certainly DOES NOT compare all UK cheapest loans or offer the lowest loan rates, and that the claims on its advertisements are basically a lie.
But that's only the start - during our test, we picked up on several other very alarming and misleading things on Moneysupermarket.com.
For example, out of the 7 results it displayed, only one of the loans - a Halifax one - was displayed with either a company logo or an option to "proceed", while the other 6 options in the table, several of which were far cheaper than Halifax, didn't offer the option to actually apply for the loan.
After some more detailed investigation, we found the sting: Halifax actually pays Moneysupermarket.com for everyone who clicks on the Proceed button. This means that Moneysupermarket.com intentionally make the other options look less important (no logo or, more importantly, a 'Proceed' button) so you're more likely to click on the one that gets it money.
The deception doesn't stop there. According to an advert on Google, Moneysupermarket.com "compare over 550 loans" but when you visit the site, that number changes to 248. Comparing 248 loans would still be quite good, but after running loads of different searches through their site, we only counted a total of 38 different loans – a long way short of the 550 Google states and 236 less than we were able to compare on Loanpages.com.
As if that wasn't enough, we looked at the various loans on Moneysupermarket.com and one of them, a Nationwide loan, was marked "Exclusive to Moneysupermarket.com". To see if that was true, we went to the Nationwide website and - surprise, surprise - found not only the exact same loan from Nationwide, but discovered it was slightly cheaper on their own website. Exclusive? Yeah, right!
As you can see then, the results speak for themselves; Moneysupermarket.com definitely does compare some loans (roughly 38, not the 550 it claims to) and it's free, but it's also massively misleading people with false advertising and biased results that, in many cases, won't be the best deal you can get.
