“THAT will never happen to me.” How many times have we ignored warnings and advisories? Scams, fatal accidents and natural disasters are only things we read and see in the news, whose victims are people that have nothing to do with us. They are just names, statistics.
Do you, like me, facepalm when another story pops up about someone falling victim to scams? Love scam, EPF scam, loan scam, investment scam, Macau scam — we Malaysians have heard of them all, from highly believable to downright laughable.
In the early days, the most common was the love scams where the victims were mainly unsuspecting women in their late 40’s and 50’s, but these days, as the modus operandi become more sophisticated, we hear about teachers, accountants and businessmen losing millions of ringgits. “They never learn!” we say, exasperated at the victims for being so gullible.
We ignore the government and banks’ scam awareness campaigns because after hearing all those viral stories, there is no way we will ever fall for them. But according to friends who had or almost became scam victims, the callers were so convincing that they started giving out confidential information willingly.
“I gave my personal details because there was a problem with my Public Bank credit card, but I never even had a Public Bank account,” a friend told me once. He was lucky, however, because his wife overheard the conversation and told him to hang up immediately.
Similarly, we learned road…
