This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on March 24, 2025 - March 30, 2025

It is often heartbreaking to see society’s most vulnerable members — such as the elderly or those with limited education — fall prey to scammers. One could argue that it takes a truly heartless individual to exploit those blinded by love or desperate for a loan or a better job to support themselves and their families.

It is, however, much harder to sympathise with those who, despite having the education and resources to know better, claim to be victims due to poor judgement — or perhaps even sheer greed.

While that may seem harsh, even adults without a background in business, finance or mathematics should understand that if an investment or “opportunity” sounds too good to be true, it likely is.

Just this month alone, local newspapers reported at least two cases of retirees losing over RM2 million each to bogus investment scams. These scams promised mind-boggling “quick returns” through certain social media platforms, where the victims’ money and “profits” could be “seen” but, unsurprisingly, not retrieved.

Is it too harsh to suggest that someone with RM2 million to invest might only have their own wilful ignorance to blame when pursuing quick gains that they, with a bit of research, should have realised were unrealistic?

Malaysia launched the National Fraud Portal #JanganKenaScam in August 2024, with details in both Malay and English on at least 11 common types of scams: phone, malware, job, phishing, mule account, e-commerce, investment, cash reward, loan, love and fake QR codes that lead to one’s personal information being exposed by downloading harmful software on one’s device.

Malaysia lost a whopping US$12.8 billion or 3% of its GDP to fraud in 2023, according to the State of Scam Report released in October 2024 by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance.

While Malaysia’s ability to rapidly identify, trace and freeze suspicious bank transactions has improved since the launch of the National Scam Response Centre with real-time data sharing among financial institutions, prevention (by arming oneself with knowledge) is still better than cure (going after perpetrators in hope of regaining losses).

We are often advised that not everything that glitters is gold and higher returns always come with higher risk. Today, it may be worth adding that extremely high returns are likely to be scams.

Despite so many reports and warnings, more people continue to be cheated. We can only point to plain greed.

Save by subscribing to us for your print and/or digital copy.

P/S: The Edge is also available on Apple's App Store and Android's Google Play.