News & Reviews:   online scam

Previously, we shared how the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) removed 63,652 pieces of fraudulent online content on social media in 2024. Well, it looks like the new year will bring more of the same, as MCMC has received over 4,000 requests to remove online content so far in 2025.

The Cyber Incident Response Centre (Cyber999), which is under the purview of CyberSecurity Malaysia, revealed that it recorded a total of 5,181 cybersecurity incidents so far this year. Specifically, the number is recorded from January to October 2024.

Another day in Malaysia and another Malaysian is scammed or cheated. Online scams alone have involved billions of ringgit lost or stolen and new AI tools are enabling scammers as well. Once lost or stolen, recovering said assets can be near impossible (unless you’re really lucky). So, it is better to not get scammed in the first place by being aware of all the possible scams that exist here in Malaysia.

In our opinion, knowing is half the battle won so we’ve listed our top 3 common scams here in Malaysia. In addition, there are already many official online resources such as the Latest Trending Commercial Crimes ebook from PDRM, the Financial Consumer Alert list from Bank Negara Malaysia and more. Read on to avoid being scammed in Malaysia.

The Minister of Communications has revealed several concerning statistics regarding fraud and scam content in our country. These include how Malaysia has lost RM3.18 billion to online scams between 2021 and April 2024.

Yesterday, we reported how Meta and TikTok have pledged their commitments to monitor fake news and 3R (race, religion, royalty) issues on their platforms following a meeting with MCMC and the Communications Ministry. Today, MCMC and PDRM released a joint statement following up on the matter, urging the 2 companies to step up monitoring of harmful content.

Deputy Communications Minister Teo Nie Ching today revealed that a whopping RM1.34 billion of losses due to online scams were recorded in our country last year. This is according to the National Scam Response Centre’s (NSRC) data from 1 January to 8 December 2023.

The Ministry of Communications and Digital (KKD) has revealed that Malaysians lost approximately RM302 million to online scams on Meta-owned platforms Instagram and Facebook. Moreover, the whopping loss amount is only for the period between January 2021 and June 2023.

We called it when Microsoft announced their VALL-E AI voice cloning project, but scammers using such AI voice cloners have already put them into action as an elderly couple were recently scammed out of $21000 Canadian dollars (~RM69115). Apparently, a “lawyer” had called the elderly couple claiming that their son had killed an American diplomat in a car accident, was in jail without a phone and needed money for legal fees.

You would think that most Malaysians would know how to dodge a potential online scam, but according to the Malaysian police force, that's the opposite. Just recently, Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Acryl Sani Abdullah Sani told the media that online scams were increasing instead. 

From time to time, we would hear news of how Malaysians get scammed online. In this news, a researcher from a Slovak internet security company, ESET, Lukáš Štefanko made a discovery and detected many fake websites are disguised as legitimate services with similar domain names in Malaysia.