Cybercrime has been on the rise in Malaysia over the past few years, and things have only worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic. To combat this, Facebook Malaysia, alongside PDRM’s Commercial Crime Investigation Department as well as other government and industry agencies have come together to launch what is called the #TakNakScam campaign.
The nature of the campaign itself is pretty straightforward, and that is to raise awareness and educating the public on the ways to avoid being a scam victim. This will go on for three months, ending in September of this year.
The main mantra, if you will, of this campaign is Spot, Check, and Report. It sounds pretty straightforward for those of us with experience wandering the perils of the web. Spotting involves identifying the type of scam that you’ve come across. Check is simply checking if something is too good to be true. And finally, report a suspected scam to the authorities.
For some numbers, a total of 67662 cases of cyber scams were reported from 2017 to 20 June 2021, leading to a total loss of RM2.23 billion. And while not a complete breakdown, 23001 of these cases involve e-commerce scams, 21008 are of the illegal loans variety, and 6273 cases were reported as investment scams.
