Petaling Jaya, 4th October 2023 - The “scam industry” in South-East Asia is generating revenue amounting to billions of US dolars, and authorities in the region have been stepping up their efforts to curb scams.

According to the United Nations’ most recent report on Online Scam Operations and Trafficking, global scamming generated US$7.8 billion (RM36.8 billion) in stolen cryptocurrency in 2021, with South-East Asia accounting for a sizable portion.

Locally, Communications and Digital minister, Tuan Fahmi Fadzil said that his ministry is in talks with the Prime Minister's Department to bring a Cabinet Memorandum on the setting up of a National Anti-Scam Task Force in Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) to curb online scams.

Yesterday, Bank Negara governor, Datuk Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour announced that all major banks in the country have implemented the restriction of authentication apps to a single device and introduced a “kill switch” for customers.

“These efforts have borne fruit as we observe a 58% reduction in unauthorised online banking transactions reported to the National Scam Response Centre (NSRC) in the last five months,” he said at the International Conference on Financial Crime and Terrorism Financing held at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre yesterday.

“Kill switch” is a feature that allows customers to deactivate their bank accounts and application access should they notice something peculiar or believe that they have been scammed.

Malaysia has also established the National Scam Response Centre hotline at 997 for the public to promptly report any scam cases or attempts.

According to the Royal Malaysia Police, Malaysia saw a drastic increase in online scams over the last two years during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a total of 71,833 scams, amounting to more than RM5.2 billion losses, which was reported from 2020 until May 2022.