BE MORE CAUTIOUS: Acryl (centre) flanked by Mohd Firdaus (left) and Stanley during the press conference at CCID headquarters.
KUCHING: Over RM1 million lost within a span of three months to online ‘boyfriend’.
A widowed housewife from Miri paid over RM1 million in ‘transaction fees’ to receive expensive gifts from her Caucasian boyfriend, only to become the latest in a long line of ‘parcel scam’ victims.
The woman, in her early 50s, sold off properties left by her late husband and took out loans with illegal money lenders over a period of three months before realising she had been conned following a meeting with her beau, who turned out to be an African.
The case, which was reported to the Commercial Crime Investigation Department (CCID) last month, was revealed to the media
by state police commissioner Datuk Acryl Sani Abdullah Sani during a press conference yesterday.
“The victim befriended and fell for the con man over the Internet and telephone calls in October 2011, and made five separate payments totalling RM1.043 million over three months to receive the non-existent gifts.
“Upon the conman’s instructions, she went to Kuala Lumpur and met him at a five-star hotel, where she handed over a further RM10,000 in cash, after which the latter disappeared,” said Acryl, adding that the victim realised she had been conned when her ‘boyfriend’ turned out to be anything but a Caucasian.
Acryl said the modus operandi used to cheat the woman bore similar characteristics to other ‘parcel scams’ reported to the police in the past.
The victims are either
housewives or career women, single, and aged between their 30 and 50s, all of whom met their
fate by surfing the Internet for online friends, lovers, or simply to meet ‘friendly’ people who are actually out to con them.
Having won their confidence and trust, the con men would proceed to lure their victims with promises of expensive gifts, money, and even marriage, or the opportunity to partake in lucrative investments.
The police commissioner said that after a day or two, the victims would receive a call from an ‘officer’ of the Customs Department or Bank Negara, stating the parcels have been detained and that a deposit into a given bank account would have to be made to secure the release.
Urging the public to exercise more caution and not to be too naive, Acryl said people should realise that official government dealings were never done over
the telephone, and that
payments were never in the form of direct deposits into bank accounts.
“If someone claiming to be from a government department calls you asking to deposit money, then there is an element of a scam involved because the authorities never do official transactions over the phone,” cautioned Acryl, adding there were a lot of ‘very slick’ locals and foreigners operating in the country.
He also disclosed that over the past two years, the state CCID had investigated 122 ‘parcel scam’ cases, with losses amounting to RM2.5 million.
Over the same period, a total of 391 cases involving Internet fraud were reported, including seven last month alone, in which the victims lost RM3.583 million.
On a broader note, Acryl said that even though the number of commercial crime cases reported last year had declined by 6.18 per cent compared to 2010, the amount lost by victims increased by 42.74 per cent, from RM38 million to RM54 million.
Cheating and criminal breach of trust, he added, made up 79 per cent of investigated cases in 2011, in which the losses reached a staggering RM53 million.
Acryl also reserved praise for the CCID, whose strategic approaches and improved investigation techniques resulted in 225 arrests last year, compared to 208 in 2010.
Among those present during the press conference yesterday were state CCID head Supt
Mohd Firdaus Abdullah and deputy head DSP Stanley Jonathan Ringgit.