What We Are Witnessing

Steve Conley
Jan 30
3 min read

Lived experience from the sharp end of financial harm

We are not writing this to campaign. We are not writing it to posture. We are writing it because someone has to say what this feels like.

At Get SAFE, we speak every week with people who have been harmed by financial practices that were technically compliant, procedurally correct, and structurally devastating.

What we are seeing is not a collection of bad apples. It is the predictable outcome of a system that works exactly as designed.

This is not just bad behaviour. This is how the system works.

Across dozens of conversations, one truth keeps repeating:

“This only works if people collapse.”

The harm we see is not accidental. It is the by-product of incentives, timelines, and power imbalances.

It works when:

people run out of stamina
people can’t afford to fight
people are isolated
people are forced to navigate complex systems while traumatised

This does not feel like isolated misconduct. It feels like a mature extraction system.

What victims are actually facing

From live cases, again and again, we see:

loans that quietly strip equity and trap people in permanent debt
domestic borrowers treated as if they were corporate speculators
terms reclassified after the fact
client books sold and resold like assets
internal remedies that go nowhere
“computer says no” responses that never change

People are not just losing money.

They are losing:

homes
health
years of their lives

What happens when they try to fight

This is where many people break.

When people try to challenge what has happened, we repeatedly witness:

legal costs weaponised to induce collapse
last-minute threats designed to terrify
settlements ignored or delayed
evidence excluded on technicalities
cases buried to avoid precedent

It does not feel like justice. It feels like procedural pressure applied until people give up.

One person told us:

“I didn’t lose because I was wrong. I lost because I couldn’t keep going.”

The closed loop of abdication

When victims ask for help, they are passed around:

the firm points to the solicitor
the solicitor points to the regulator
the regulator points to the ombudsman
the ombudsman points to the courts

Everyone tells them where to go. No one owns the outcome. No one owns the harm.

Victims describe it as being treated like a hot potato.

The psychological reality nobody talks about

This is not just financial harm.

People come to us presenting with:

cognitive fog
exhaustion
collapse of agency
learned helplessness
re-traumatisation
suicidal ideation
numbness

These are not weak people. They are traumatised people.

And traumatised people cannot navigate adversarial bureaucracies.

The hidden structural mismatch

Institutions can drag things out for years. Humans cannot.

Institutions have:

teams
budgets
time

People have:

one nervous system

This is not about merit. It is about stamina economics.

What we found ourselves doing — by necessity

Without planning to, we started doing things no one else was doing:

stabilising people in emotional free-fall
organising chaotic timelines
structuring evidence
translating legal language
preventing suicides
stopping repossessions

Not as lawyers .Not as regulators. But as a human stabilisation layer.

Because without that, nothing else works.

The ethical tension nobody wants to name

Settlements:

stop people becoming homeless
stop suicides
buy time
preserve witnesses

But they also raise a hard question:

“If one person is compensated quietly, does the harm simply continue elsewhere?”

If people are not stabilised first, systemic justice never happens. Because the witnesses do not survive long enough.

Why we are sharing this

We are sharing this so it is not erased. So it is not sanitised. So it is not forgotten.

Not to inflame. ot to recruit. Not to posture.

But to say, plainly and professionally:

This is what it feels like on the receiving end of a structurally untrustworthy system.

And if parts of the industry are oblivious to this, that is no longer a neutral position.

A closing word to professionals

From one practitioner to another:

We are not imagining this. We are not exaggerating this. We are living this.

Whatever interpretation comes later, these are the realities we are seeing in people’s lives right now.

“This wasn’t just about money.It broke my sense of who I am.”