IN 2012, the Eye wrote about online love scams operating out of Malaysia. Back then, it was already mentioned in the column that Malaysia was the hub for these love scams.
In 2014, statistics and surveys found that Malaysia still ranked high as the scam capital for online romance scams.
It was reported that in 2014, the losses incurred by victims of such scams in Malaysia was RM52 million.
One would think that people would have become wiser following the publicity and news coverage on these scams.
Unfortunately the figure of financial losses increased to RM199 million last year and the number of cases increased from 1,028 to 1,521 in the same period.
Imagine that! RM52 million ringgit could go a long way in developing schools and educational facilities in rural Sarawak, what more RM199 million!
Yet, there are gullible victims simply giving away their money.
Eye do not mean to be cold-hearted and cruel towards these victims, but seriously, if you are so willing to give away your hard-earned cash to your online Romeos or Juliets, why have you not, after all this while, put that money towards a meaningful cause?
Just last week, Malaysian Commercial Crime Investigation Department director Datuk Seri Mortadza Nazarene acknowledged that the police have received reports from Interpol stating that Malaysia has become a hub for African ‘love’ scams.
Year in and year out, we read about women and men falling prey to people whom they give their hearts to over the Internet, without having once, met face to face. They are swept into an online romance, enticed by charming words and fake photographs. Some are even sent expensive gifts as teasers during the initial stages of the romance.
These scammers are good at the art of wooing. They target the desperate. They seduce their victims with exactly what these lonely hearts want to hear. They know what makes their victims tick, what turns them on and win them over – trust, heart and all.
They are great at spinning stories, weaving a tangled web of lies and as the relationship develops, so do the stories – they suddenly need money for an emergency, a family member is suffering from a terminal disease, or perhaps they even lost their money in a business deal.
Out of love and a lack of common sense, the victim obligingly sends money over.
The scammers promise to pay them back and even make pledges to come over soon, so that they, the lovebirds, will be together at last.
Malaysians are not the only victims. Surprisingly, a high number of Australians have also fallen prey to these dark romances operating out of Malaysia.
It was reported that the scams have cost the Aussies A$30 million dollars in the 2014 to 2015 period.
These love scams target single mothers, lonely women, housewives, working professionals and even men.
It still boggles the mind as to how educated professionals, who deem themselves Internet savvy, still fall for such scams.
Three years ago, the Eye wrote that these scammers also have local counterparts. They still do.
These local counterparts are usually women, who would also pose to lure lonely men, or as representatives from local establishments, for example the Customs Department or courier companies, to call and say “hey you have your parcel, but you have to pay such-and-such amount to have it released”.
Apart from romancing their victims and then getting their cash through sob stories, online scammers have resolved to blackmail these days.
According to CyberSecurity Malaysia CEO Dr Amirudin Abdul Wahab, a scammer first gets close with his or her victim through Facebook or other social media platforms and then proceeds with video chatting.
At some point the scammer will lure the victim into committing some indecent act or stripping nude, capture these photos or videos and use them to get the victim to pay them to avoid these photos or videos being made public.
A lady friend shared her experience with dubious friend requests on Facebook. According to her, she receives an average of five requests a week.
These requests all feature Caucasian men and an occasional African or Asian man, with similar backgrounds and hardly anyone on their friends list.
A quick browse through their FB timelines revealed that they do not post anything on their walls, except for the occasional switch between a few profile photos.
She also noted that their profiles state that they are engineers or executives of sorts and many list the same university or company name in their very brief profile, even through the photos and names were different.
She doesn’t accept these requests. Neither does she delete them for comparison. She is sure that they are one or a few persons under the guise of photos they have stolen from others.
She also noted another group who used the ‘single father’ persona, where loving playtime photos of father and child are used as profile photos in the hopes of melting women’s hearts.
These scammers are not only breaking bank accounts and hearts, they are also unscrupulous identity thieves who scour the net for random professional looking profile photos of innocent men and women.
We are all too familiar with reports of such incidences.
By the time these cases are reported in the media, it is already too late. Someone would have just lost a lot of money, while the scammers get off scot free, mainly because they use VPNs or Virtual Private Networks that are difficult to track.
Eye remember watching an expose on television about how local and international authorities tracked down one such syndicate working out of Malaysia.
The authorities trailed the messages exchanged between a middle-aged Australian lady (whose concerned family members had alerted the authorities) and the scammers and eventually caught up with the scammers in Malaysia.
Sadly though, at the end of the documentary, the lady in question refused to believe that she had fallen prey to such a scam, even when presented with the evidence.
It was also indicated at the end of the programme that she continued to search for love online, undeterred by the amount of money she had lost.
Will we continue to see a rise in the figures of such scams operating out of Malaysia? Regardless of how many of them are caught and thrown in jail, such scammers will always be present as long as there are gullible victims.
When will people learn not to fall for such scams especially since all the warning signals are present?
Comments can reach the writer via [email protected].