Sergei has watched in horror as Russian television has been flooded with reports about vicious debt collectors terrorising households in order to recover overdue loans.

In December, the 29-year-old from the south-western city of Voronezh became one of 11.5 million Russians to fall behind on loan payments.

In January authorities said a debt collector threw a firebomb through an apartment window - badly burning a child

But despite owing just £230, Sergei says that he and others have been hounded by bailiffs demanding the money be repaid.

Dubbed “vultures of the crisis”, overzealous debt collectors have shot to prominence – a byproduct of a prolonged recession fuelled by the collapse of world oil prices and compounded by western sanctions.

But concern has been growing over their increasingly violence methods. On 27 January authorities in the city of Ulyanovsk said a collector chasing down a 4,000-rouble (£35) debt threw a firebomb through a debtor’s apartment window, badly burning a two-year-old boy. The event caused a national uproar.

In December, in the southern Rostov region, police with sniffer dogs and bomb-disposal technicians evacuated a kindergarten after a teacher who owed money was told the premises would be blown up unless she paid.

In the spotlight are microfinancing organisations at the unregulated end of Russia’s debt-collection industry – small lenders that hand out short-term loans to poorer clients at high rates.

Mortgage holders rally by Russian Central Bank, calling for their loans to be recalculated after rouble crash. Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/TASS

Soaring debt

Russian politicians have been proposing new legislation to sound tough on debt collectors

Parliamentary elections scheduled for September will be the biggest test of the electorate’s mood since 2014, when the collapse of world oil prices hit the economy hard and western sanctions – punishment for the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine – increased its isolation.

Though President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings have suffered only limited damage so far, politicians have been proposing new legislation to sound tough on debt collectors, now being dubbed by the public as “black bailiffs” and “vultures of the crisis”.

In the wake of the firebombing in Ulyanovsk, the speaker of the upper parliament house, Valentina Matviyenko, called for collection agencies to stop operating, pending new legislation to regulate the industry.

In January the Liberal Democratic party submitted a draft bill in the lower house, the State Duma, that would effectively outlaw collection agencies by prohibiting the recouping of debts by anyone other than the original creditor.

Vitaly Milonov, a prominent politician in St Petersburg, said he would battle against debt collectors with the same vigour with which he supported the city’s notorious so-called anti “gay propaganda” law. “We recognise [debt] collectors as a new kind of homosexual,” Milonov is reported to have said.

Tom Adshead, a partner at Macro-Advisory, a Moscow-based financial consulting firm, questioned whether more legislation would make a difference. “The problem is the standard problem with everything in Russia, which is that the courts don’t work properly. There is room for criminal debt-collection agencies.”

Homeless men in St Petersburg. The number of Russians struggling to repay loans has risen to 7.3 million. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Support

As Russia recovered from the 2008 global economic crisis, borrowing more than doubled to 210bn roubles in December 2012, according to the central bank. Last year, the monthly figure averaged about 225bn roubles.

In boom times, the country was festooned with enticing advertisements for loans. One showed a wheelbarrow full of cash and the words “take as much as you want”, another featured film star Bruce Willis telling Russians “when I need money, I just take it”.

With legal protections weak, several support groups for victims of debt collectors have formed on social networks such as VKontakte. One of them, Stop Collector!, is run by Aleksandr Naryshkin, a 31-year-old computer programmer in St Petersburg who has received threats from collectors since 2013 – including one in which he says he was told he would be “enslaved as a prostitute”.

On his group, where thousands have turned for advice, he recommends debtors go to court and not cave in to threats by telephone.

Mikhail Karpenko, a lawyer in the Urals, has helped Naryshkin’s group by giving free legal advice. “In our region at least, Chelyabinsk Oblast, the population is heavily in debt. People just fall into a black hole of debt, and can’t get out,” Karpenko says. “In my opinion, we need to remove the entire institution of collectors.”

But Sergei has little hope that the situation will improve. “Laws to help oligarchs are passed in the space of a week, while laws for people take years to pass,” he says. “These draft bills are probably just PR.”

A version of this article first appeared on RFE/RL