An Empirical Research On Criminal Judicial Determination Of “Loan Trap”

In recent years,“loan trap” as a new type of crime,has become a hot issue of social concern.“Loan trap” is neither a criminal concept nor an independent accusation.It is just a general term for a kind of criminal acts that illegally possessing the victim's property in the name of private lending.Due to “loan trap” has shown its trend of concealment,diversified criminal methods and serious consequences,the Ministry of Public Security has classified it as a new type of crime committed by evil forces.Before the introduction of the judicial interpretation of “Opinions on Several Issues in Handling Criminal Cases of ‘Loan Trap' ”,“Loan trap” as a new case,there is no uniform standard of judicial determination for this kind of criminal case in judicial practice.And there is the phenomenon of treating it as a civil economic dispute.With the frequent occurrence of this kind of case and the special campaign against crime and evil,the hidden social harmfulness of“loan trap” has been exposed more and more,so it is necessary to regulate such cases by criminal law.However,due to the criminal methods of “loan trap” are extremely confusing,how to accurately identify it from legitimate private lending is a difficult problem for judicial authorities in dealing with such cross-cases.We should not only pay attention to strike “loan trap” cases accurately,but also insist on the theory of limitation on applying criminal law,so as to avoid the broader impact of criminal law.At the same time,“loan trap” has the following difficulties and dilemmas in judicial determination,that is how to accurately convict and sentence criminals and how to define the nature of criminal groups.In this paper,the data comes from the criminal cases of “loan trap” in China Judgments Online,taking the judgments written after the judicial interpretation as the samples to make an empirical analysis.Based on these sample cases,the difficulties in criminal judicial determination of “loan trap”are summarized,mainly including the difficulty in identifying the nature of it,the controversy over the choice of accusation and the complicity in “loan trap” cases.In view of the above difficulties,the countermeasures are put forward,mainly for strictly adhering to the principle of legally prescribed punishment for a crime,accurately applying laws to the convicts and improving the mechanism for linking criminal law with civil law.