With the vigorous development of financial technology, online consumer credit lending has become a key area of financial innovation, attracting significant attention from both the academic and industry communities. Why do online lending borrowers pay high interest rates to borrow money, and what impact will these loans have on their consumption? The relationship between borrowers’lending behavior and their consumption behavior warrants indepth exploration and research. This paper conducts an empirical study on the consumption behavior of borrowers with the characteristic of “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul” on a large domestic online lending platform, based on their real lending data. The research findings are as follows: First, overall, online lending has a stimulating effect on borrowers’total Taobao consumption before borrowing. Second, compared with borrowers who do not exhibit the pattern of “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul”, borrowers with this characteristic show a significant increase in both total Taobao consumption and nonessential consumption in the short period before borrowing. This indicates that they have certain economic and consumption capabilities and are more inclined to purchase nonessential goods and engage in upgraded consumption. Third, borrowers exhibiting the characteristic of “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul” display a phenomenon of “preconsumption”, often consuming first and borrowing later. This study attempts to explore the relationship between borrowers’lending behavior and consumption behavior from the perspective of borrowers’borrowing motives, which has important academic value and practical significance for clarifying borrowers’borrowing motives and assisting regulators in strengthening the supervision of the online consumer credit lending industry.