NST Leader: 'Scamdemic' - How to stop it from happening
The State of Scam Report 2024 pointed to a humongous RM53.34 billion loss in 2023 alone, based on a survey.
The rise in scams year after year is troubling. Worried about the scale of the rise in online scams, the government is adopting a number of measures, such as passing laws aimed specifically at tackling cybercrime and strengthening the National Scam Response Centre (NSRC).
But, however laudable such initiatives are, they are mostly directed at curbing scams after they happen.
The best way to crack online scams is to stop them from happening. Not easy to do, but not impossible either.
Not easy because it needs cross-border coordination. Not impossible because it has been done, though rarely.
The best place to start is the fabled Golden Triangle — Myanmar, Laos and Thailand — and a bit more into Cambodia, where, as Time magazine put it in March last year, a reboot is happening from poppies to pig-butchering, a term used to describe the fattening of a hog for slaughter.
Initially, it was a heroin manufacturing hub for sale as far as New York. But a combined onslaught by China and the United States' war on drugs, the magazine argues, has forced the region to reboot to become a global cybercrime centre.
The Myanmar military coup in February 2021 has made the situation worse.
The fabled triangle has become more fabled by being "the world's cybercrime hotspot", where armies of trafficked scammers in some thousand scam prisons "orchestrate romance-investment cons, crypto fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling operations", as Time put it. It is a "scamdemic", says the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand are no strangers to Malaysia. They are all members of Asean.
So in theory at least, coordination should not be that difficult. But Asean is known as a place where theory and practice diverge.
To Malaysia's credit, it has done a far more difficult thing by making peace possible between Thailand and Cambodia as the chair of Asean.
A good place for the fight against online cybercrime in the Golden Triangle to begin is in October when top leaders of Asean, China, the US and elsewhere gather in Kuala Lumpur for its summit.
Coordinated action isn't new, but is occasional and not persistent. According to Vietnamnetglobal, a news portal, an example of a joint raid happened on June 17 between Laos and Vietnam police on a high-tech scam network based deep within the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ), leading to the detention of 74 suspects, including the ring leader.
The year before, Laos, in a raid on the GTSEZ in cooperation with China, deported 1,389 suspects to Beijing. More of this must happen often if we want to stop online scams from starting.
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