Tuesday 19 February 2013
Thursday 14 February 2013
Monday 4 February 2013
Many locals victims of online scams
MIRI: The number of Sarawakians cheated in online scams is surprisingly large, and they are surprisingly frequent, with cases involving huge amount of money reported every month.
SUPP information chief, Datuk Sebastian Ting, told The
Star yesterday that his party had been inundated by frequent appeals for help
from victims of the scams.
He used the word “surprisingly” big because with so many
such cases happening, and with so much publicity being given to the cases, the
general public would have be-come wise and be more cautious.
However, he said, it seemed that despite the high number
of victims and wide publicity, even more people have become victims again and
again. SUPP offices across the state, including here, have received increasing
number of reports of such cases from victims, he claimed.
“The number of reports we get, and also the reports
lodged at police stations, have shot up and they are increasing all the time,”
he said.
According to him, it would appear that some people were
making it too easy for online scammers to cheat them by being too easily coaxed
into revealing their personal data, financial details, bank accounts and other
details.
“It is extremely difficult to solve such cases because it
involves tracking down the senders of the messages, which means getting the
cooperation of telecommunication companies or multimedia sources,” he
explained.
He admitted that SUPP did not have enough manpower and
expertise for such an endeavour.
He further pointed out that if the victims had already
made payments into bank accounts, there was a need to track down the account
holders and look at the details of the accounts.
“This would involve banks or Bank Negara. Tedious legal
processes would be involved,” he said.
Ting, who is Piasau SUPP chairman and the proposed SUPP
candidate for Miri parliamentary seat in the coming elections, was commenting
on yet another local scam involving more than RM100,000. Two brothers had
lodged a police report claiming that they had been cheated of large sums of
money by a woman who claimed that she was dying from cancer in the United
Kingdom.
She allegedly cheated them into depositing money into
dubious ac-counts by telling them that she would donate US$15mil to them to
distribute to local churches and or-phanages. Ting yesterday said SUPP had
issued many warnings and advice to people on how they could avoid being cheated
in such scams.
“The very basic principle is that if you receive an offer
of big sums of money from sources you do not know, you must immediately be
suspicious.
“If something is too good to be true, then it may be a
scam. If there is demand for money up front, that is already a reason to ignore
the message and terminate any contact with the sender immediately,” Ting said.
Ting urged members of the public not to entertain such
messages or to discuss terms and conditions with them because the more they
respond, the higher the likelihood that they would end up as victims.
He warned the public that such scams were orchestrated by
people who were very convincing and who knew the tricks of their wicked trade.
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