Same thing happened to me - not recently, years ago. This is an old pattern - one of the reasons so many religions forbade the loaning of money at interest, especially compound interest.
It makes perfect sense if the goal is debt peonage - which would be the obvious best outcome for the moneylenders involved, from a competitive free market point of view.
The basic idea is to own your paper (an older term) - have you obligated to them, not their competitors - when a short run of bad luck prevents you from paying as you go, "temporarily".
This bad luck is - for obvious reasons - likely to coincide with general economic troubles in your economic world, which cripple your ability to dig out in various ways (often including the adjustment of the interest rate on your debt) - the outcome is a large population of responsible working adults who are handing 10 - 25% of their monthly income to a moneylender for the past use of money already repaid.