Malaysia has fair share of suckers
To date, no Malaysian has been arrested for masterminding an Internet scam.
Though tricks like the black money hoax, Internet lottery rip-off, “e-mail con of deposed autocrat looking for help to smuggle his money out of the country, and more recently, the SMS scam and the cow vaccine swindle are not unheard of here. Most of the scams are believed to be perpetrated by Nigerian, Eastern European and, increasingly, Chinese cartels.
Going by the number of police reports lodged though, and perhaps more tellingly, by the number of police reports not lodged, it is fair to assume that there are suckers aplenty in Malaysia.
After all, it was barely a year ago that a story surfaced about how an experienced lawyer fell prey to Nigerian fraudsters who told her that she had won more than RM3mil in the El Gordo Spanish Lottery.
Instead of basking in her winnings, she was taken to the cleaners and wound up losing close to RM100,000.
These scam artistes use all sorts of software and spyware to obtain details of e-mail accounts from all over the world and send out their “con mail” by the tens of thousands.
According to police statistics, 1,243 commercial crimes related to computers and cheating were reported from January to March this year.
Though tricks like the black money hoax, Internet lottery rip-off, “e-mail con of deposed autocrat looking for help to smuggle his money out of the country, and more recently, the SMS scam and the cow vaccine swindle are not unheard of here. Most of the scams are believed to be perpetrated by Nigerian, Eastern European and, increasingly, Chinese cartels.
Going by the number of police reports lodged though, and perhaps more tellingly, by the number of police reports not lodged, it is fair to assume that there are suckers aplenty in Malaysia.
After all, it was barely a year ago that a story surfaced about how an experienced lawyer fell prey to Nigerian fraudsters who told her that she had won more than RM3mil in the El Gordo Spanish Lottery.
Instead of basking in her winnings, she was taken to the cleaners and wound up losing close to RM100,000.
These scam artistes use all sorts of software and spyware to obtain details of e-mail accounts from all over the world and send out their “con mail” by the tens of thousands.
According to police statistics, 1,243 commercial crimes related to computers and cheating were reported from January to March this year.
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