Sabah student’s Google award turns out to be false

KOTA KINABALU: A 15-year-old boy is now inadvertently under the spotlight after his claim of receiving an award from Google turned out to be untrue.

The Sabah Education Department launched a probe following reports about Yusrim Karim’s achievement, which Google Malaysia said was factually wrong.

Sabah Education Department director Datuk Jame Alip said he had asked the Sandakan District Education office for a report on the matter.

District education officer Sharif Mahada Sharif Attar said they were gathering information.

Google Malaysia’s head of communications and public affairs department Zeffri Yusoff said the case appeared to be an unfortunate misunderstanding.

There was no such competition organised by Google Ideas, he said.

“I checked with Google Ideas and they did not send any e-mail to the boy. I can only speculate for now that he might have received a spam e-mail,” said Zeffri.

On Wednesday, officials of SMK Merpati, where Yusrim studied, said he told them he got a US$50,000 (RM185,000) award from Google Ideas in December for his online messaging app Coker Chat, which provides instantaneous translation.

Word of Yusrim’s “achievement” and photographs of him with education officials in Sandakan went viral on WhatsApp.

Reporters were allowed to meet Yusrim at his school on Wednesday.

But by late evening, some of them were requested by school officials not to publish the story to protect the privacy of Yusrim and his family.