News & Reviews:   online scam

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.

Online scams are a common issue that we have to face daily and it has come to our attention that scammers are learning to send direct messages to your profile. Shopee just highlighted on their Facebook post that there's new Parcel Scam and this is what you should do if you encounter one.

In this modern internet age, one might think that it's almost impossible to get scammed online if there's a too-good-to-be-true deal. Not for these two Malaysians though, who recently got conned and lost a total of RM6800. How in the world did this happen? Well, take a read below.