News & Reviews:   scam

Scammers are surely upping their game. A few hours ago, TGV Cinemas posted an update on fake ticket giveaways sent by them to unsuspecting victims. According to TGV, they are now sending QR codes pretending to give two free tickets via email.

Scams and phishing are on the rise these days. Given how advanced technology is nowadays, it can be difficult to separate between false alerts and genuine emails from your bank. That said, Maybank just released a statement regarding a fake Maybank email.

In an effort to prevent increased scams and spam on YouTube Shorts, YouTube will be taking action soon to make links in Shorts comments, descriptions and live feeds unclickable. It will begin on 13 August 2023, to further prevent users from harmful content and malware. 

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.

The government recently distributed eBeliaRahmah RM200 eWallet credit to youths aged 18 to 20 and eligible full-time students in our country. However, since its disbursement, there have been many stories of recipients getting scammed when trying to cash out the credit, something that the initiative expressly said NOT to do. 

As you should know, Telegram has finally agreed to work with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) and the Royal Police Force (PDRM) to combat cybercrimes on its platform. We have been wondering when MCMC would also take action against Facebook and the announcement has been made.

In case you didn't receive it, a few of us have gotten an SMS from our respective telcos. Starting on 2 July 2023, SMS containing links, requesting personal data and phone numbers will be blocked to prevent online fraud. 

From time to time, we would get scam messages and calls on our phones. While you could always install the Truecaller app, it doesn't work for WhatsApp which scammers tend to use nowadays. However, that could change in the future.

By now, you should know scams in Malaysia have been quite prominent. Not only are we getting scam messages from our mobile phones, but they also exist in Facebook Ads which poses a huge problem. To address this problem, Communications and Digital Minister Fahmi Fadzil is going to take action.

Today, Google announced that the Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) will be expanded in Gmail. Introduced in 2021, this new update will now have a checkmark icon from senders to show verifications, just like the blue ticks from Facebook and Twitter.