KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 12 — Falling for a scam these days does not necessarily mean the victim is a fool or lacks worldly experience.
Instead, it proves that scammers have become much more sophisticated.
Chief Operation Officer of Yayasan Digital Malaysia, Ahmad Faizal Zulkipli said that many scam victims today fall prey to social engineering tactics that aim to convince or persuade a person to believe their words are true.
“A very simple term, pukau. It’s not black magic but social engineering,” he told Malay Mail in a recent interview.
For example, he said some victims have received a call from a phone number they recognise as legit or trustworthy, like an actual bank or police station.
“They then recreate an environment to replicate an actual officer. Then they play a good cop-bad cop role and slowtalk you like you are a friend,” he said, explaining the modus operandi used by scammers, and added that these are all scripted.
“One trade secret we believe is that they are using actual psychologists,” he said.
Ahmad told Malay Mail of a police raid in which the officers found documents that seemed to be scripts for SMSes and emails used by scammers, adding that these appeared to have been used in recent cases as well as those dating back to the year 2000.
“This means that the same people writing these kinds of scripts are not just one person, but a huge group,” he said.
Independent psychotherapist Meg Richy affirmed that mind control techniques that rely on phone calls employed by scammers are a social construct and have been clinically proven to work.
“These methods are usually used by sales agencies and customer services, but now scammers are using it,” Meg said.
She explained that someone who is given a document has more time to read, think, and digest its contents, compared to listening to information as attention will be focused on the caller.
“When I’m talking to you, your 100 per cent attention is on me from the very beginning.
“When I’m continuously talking to you, you will start to say yes. The moment you say ‘yes’ more than five to six times to whatever I’ve said, you are going to follow through,” Meg said.
Once the scammer has control of a person’s mind, the rest of the scam process will fall in place, she said.
“They are prepared to the level of telling you what to tell the bank, what to tell the police, using psychological elements. If this is the question, what could be the next answer. They have a mind map of questions and answers.”
Mule account scams
Ahmad said that a popular method for online scams is through mule bank accounts, and that this included job scams in which the recruiter will offer employment through online interviews.
“From the period of the interview until reporting day, the candidates will receive instructions to do certain things, such as purchasing uniforms,” he said. This is the first scam.
Next, the candidates are instructed to open a bank account and asked to send over their bank cards with a condition that it will be returned on reporting day.
“On reporting day, the candidates find that they have been scammed; the job offer does not exist.
“They return home forgetting that the scammers already have their personal information and bank account details that will be utilised as mule accounts,” he said.
He recalled a case in which a scam victim has faced 37 court charges over the mule accounts.
APK file scams
APK stands for Android Package Kit and the scam works by enabling a third party to gain control of your mobile phone once you install that file.
“For example, you see an advertisement for a domestic helper. You click on the advertisement and it prompts you to a WhatsApp chat.
“Next you are told that all payments need to be done on their mobile application.
“The moment you install the application, during the questions asked on settings permission, if you say yes, they will have full control of your phone,” Ahmad said.
The victim is then directed to a page that looks like a legit payment page. This page keeps loading, and by then the scammer would have hijacked the victim’s bank account username and password.
“Once they have emptied your bank account, they will pass your details to another department to carry out another scam, blackmail, and followed by another scam when the victim is trying to retrieve their money,” he added.
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