KUALA LUMPUR: Authorities spent the equivalent of nearly four years of man-hours to submit takedown requests for online scam and gambling content this year, only for much of the same material to resurface again within days.
Communications Minister Datuk Fahmi Fadzil said more than 90% of the 271,472 content removal applications submitted by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) between January and May 23 involved scam and online gambling-related content.
According to Fahmi, each takedown application takes an average of 37 minutes to process, highlighting the sheer scale and labour involved in policing harmful online content.
“The takedown requests this year alone amounted to at least 3.87 years of man-hours.
“This is despite the fact that much of the content is repetitive. We inform platforms that the content is scam-related, yet the same material reappears the next day.
“This game of cat and mouse has to stop,” he said in his closing speech at the Inter-Agency Retreat on Combatting Online Scam here yesterday.
Fahmi said Malaysians lost RM2.7bil to scammers last year, while Bank Negara managed to block RM1.2bil worth of scam-related transactions during the same period.
To strengthen enforcement efforts, he said the government is considering setting up a new committee dedicated to tackling online scams.
The proposed committee will bring together enforcement agencies, regulators, financial institutions and telecommunications companies to improve coordination and streamline enforcement efforts.
Representatives from the Online Safety Committee are also expected to be included.
“The proposal will be brought to the Cabinet in the coming weeks. We are looking to establish it as soon as possible,” Fahmi said, adding that a dedicated council on online scams could also be formed if necessary.
He stressed the need to address the psychological impact on scam victims.
“Most of the time, they are just seen as statistics. We need to help them recover from the trauma, especially since scams often involve large sums of money,” he said.
He also urged victims to lodge reports immediately after discovering they had been scammed.
At the same event, Fahmi witnessed the exchange of an MOU between the MCMC and the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (Gasa).
The exchange involved MCMC managing director Abdul Karim Fakir Ali and Gasa South-East Asia adviser Rajeshpal Singh Sandhu.
The MOU aims to expand international cooperation in combating online scams through information sharing, best practices, capacity-building, advocacy and greater public awareness on digital scams.
On a related matter, Fahmi said legal action is being considered against Facebook over what he described as a “lack of cooperation” in addressing online scams and gambling content.
He said 81% of online gambling-related content flagged for removal was found on Facebook, while 58% of scam-related content was also linked to the platform.
“In my opinion, legal action may have to be taken, but I leave it to the MCMC on this and give them (Facebook) one last opportunity to prove that they want to cooperate with the government,” he said.
