could it be just some half-automated "big data"-style analysis identifying clients who are at higher risk of default and thus getting special credit policies. And i'd say it is a successful analysis at that if illegal pharmacies were among the businesses put into that set.

One can imagine how any reasonable automated classificator working over previous history would put a business with 2 such attributes like "business: pharmacy" and "location: foreign" into the category with higher risk.

As a side note - we have a "reasonable person" test in courts today, and, as more and more of things are being automated, i think we'll have a "reasonable automated classificator/learning system" tomorrow :)