META Malaysia’s (Meta is the parent company behind Facebook and Instagram) recent roll-out of new initiatives under the nationwide #TakNakScam awareness campaign is most timely given that Malaysians have lost RM5.2 bil alone from 2020 until May 2022.
Unsurprisingly, of the 71,833 cases reported to the Royal Malaysian Police’s (PDRM) Commercial Crimes Investigation Department, 68% or 48,850 of the cases involved online scams.
This is very much in sync with the observation by Meta Malaysia’s country director Nicole Tan that new consumer behaviours around online buying and browsing habits that emerged during the pandemic will remain entrenched among Malaysians.
E-commerce scams came in second with 5,851 cases recorded in 2020, 9,569 cases last year and 3,833 cases up to May this year. There were 350 reported job scams while loan and investment scams accounted for 11,875 cases between 2020 to May 2022.
Outside the police force, the Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry received 24,018 complaints regarding online fraud and electronic media scams involving losses amounting to RM21.7 mil from the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic period in 2020 till Feb 17 this year.
“As such, continuing user education is important to avoid falling into such scams. We want to encourage people to come forward and report so there won’t be more scam victims,” its minister Datuk Seri Alexander Nanta Linggi pointed out.
Among the challenges faced by PDRM in its quest to combat scams is to encourage people to come forward to lodge a report at the police station.
Victims may sometimes feel ashamed to admit that have fallen prey to scammers when the reality is that their hesitance will further dampen efforts by the authorities to track down the scammers effectively.
“However, I would like to highlight that between the year 2020 and May this year, of the total 48,850 online scam cases reported, 26,213 cases were prosecuted in court,” revealed a spokesman from PDRM’s Commercial Crime Investigation Department’s cyber and multimedia crime investigation unit.
Interestingly, he further observed that there was a downward trend in the number of scam cases reported during the #TakNakScam campaign period.
Meanwhile, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has managed to block 1.6 billion suspicious calls from reaching Malaysians between 2018 and 2021. Any abuse of ICT channels for bad intentions like scams is an actionable offence, according to its consumer and industry affairs head Eneng Faridah Iskandar Sastrawidjaja.
This year’s #TakNakScam campaign will focus on the top five most prevalent online scams, namely e-commerce scams, illegal loans, job scams, investment scams, and money muling. First launched in July 2021, the campaign aims to create awareness and educate the public on how to spot, check and report against highly deceptive tactics employed by scammers.
Apart from PDRM, the Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry and MCMC, other core campaign partners of the initiative are the Securities Commission Malaysia (SC), Bursa Malaysia Bhd, the Association of Banks in Malaysia (ABM), CyberSecurity Malaysia and the Federation of Malaysian Consumers Associations (FOMCA). – Aug 6, 2022
Pic credit: Caporaso and Partners Law Office, Panama
