ALOR STAR: The friendly nature of the Malays and tendency to “entertain” strangers have led to many of them being scammed, said Consumers Association of Kedah (Cake) president Yusrizal Yusoff today.
“There are several factors and we are aware of statistics that Malays are the most vulnerable.
“First of all, the majority of the population is Malay, so it’s no surprise that the number of Malays being scammed is higher.
“The second is a lack of information about methods used by scammers.
“But third and most worrying is the culture of Malays. We conclude that they tend to scammers too much,” he said when contacted.
He said many Malays would fall victim to online scammers even after they had attended online consumer safety programmess.
“Government agencies and non-government agencies have done their best to raise awareness but the population in this demographic still gets scammed.
“Even youths in this group have become victims of online scams. There are a lot of people between the ages of 20 to 40 who have fallen victim to scams.
“They are aware about scammers but their wariness disappears when they get scam calls.
“We have done awareness campaigns in universities and we were shocked to find out that some of the participants had been scammed by the same methods that we have warned them about.”
Yusrizal said the best wayto tackle the issue was to have laws against online scammers.
He said the authorities lacked the right to take action against scammers.
Yesterday, Home Minister Datuk Seri Hamzah Zainudin said statistics showed that the majority of online scam victims were Malays with 42,755 cases, followed by Chinese and Indians at 21,225 and 7,039 respectively, while others groups had 8,540.
He said RM2,513,732,701.72 of losses were incurred from 79,559 online scams from January to Sept 15 this year, with the majority of victims aged 21 to 40.
Source: New Straits Times
