The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has issued its harshest set of restrictions yet to rein in the country’s peer-to-peer and micro-lending businesses, putting a tight leash on an industry that was feeding off young borrowers living beyond their means.

Effective immediately, the central bank and its regional branches must stop licensing any new online micro-loan lenders, while offline “brick-and-mortar” lenders must be constrained to operating within their registered locations. “In recent years, some regional authorities have approved the set up of online small lending companies, or allowed small-loan companies to run online lending services, while the consumer lending business provided to some institutions contained relatively big risks,” the bank said in its November 21 instruction. China’s economy is awash with billions of yuan of cheap capital, as scores of micro-loan lenders have sprouted in recent years in place of traditional state-owned banks to provide funding and capital to everything from start-ups and entrepreneurship to personal borrowings.

China’s outstanding short-term consumer loans grew by CNY1.49 trillion through the first nine months of 2017, almost double the CNY830 billion growth in the whole of 2016, the South China Morning Post reports.