Illegal money lending proliferated in many Gypsy settlements in Slovakia in the 1990s. Powerful village loan sharks demanded interest rates as high as several hundred percent, trapping their victims in a vicious circle of paying all their incomes (mostly social allowances) to their "benefactor" and having to borrow another amount of money in order to survive. Many of such debtors became criminals out of necessity, either trying to get money in alternative ways or in order to pay off some of their debts. It was reported in 1999 that certain loan shark from a poor village in Eastern Slovakia, feared and therefore inaccessible, had over a short time accumulated as much as one million Slovak crowns (equivalent to about US$ 25,000) in the time when average salary in Slovakia was about six thousand crowns ($150) and social allowances were still less than that.