Job scam victims get electrocuted if they don’t perform

Compiled by FATIMAH ZAINAL, TAN SIN CHOW and R. ARAVINTHAN

A GROUP of Malaysian job scam victims in Cambodia was forced to work for 18 hours without a break and would get electrocuted if they failed to get customers, reported Utusan Malaysia.

A victim, who wanted to be known only as Adan, 36, said they were promised work as casino attendants in the resort town of Sihanoukville.

“However, when we got there, we were forced to deceive individuals all over the world, especially Malaysia, through calls, WhatsApp and other social media platforms,” he said.

Adan and 20 others were placed on the fifth floor of a seven-storey building under round-the-clock surveillance by many armed guards.

Their job, he said, was just to be in front of their respective computers to connect with customers to invest in shares, gamble and even “fall in love”.

Adan, who has extensive experience in deceiving victims, advised the public to avoid clicking on unknown links on devices or smartphones.

The link is a trap specially designed by the syndicate’s IT experts to “suck” money from the bank account of victims who wouldn’t even realise that it had been accessed, he added.

He was among six Malaysian job scam victims from Sabah and Sarawak who were brought home from Phnom Penh yesterday by the Malaysian International Humanitarian Organisation, which rescued them through a special mission in Cambodia recently.

> Some 44,400 residents of a village in Hulu Terengganu live in fear and are unable to sleep well at night since a group of wild elephants started entering their area recently.

Kosmo! reported that in an incident that happened at 3am at Kampung Basong on Thursday, the pachyderms destroyed dozens of banana trees and other plants in front of the residents’ homes.

The above articles are compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a >, it denotes a separate news item.