Scammers prey on people’s ignorance, desperation and greediness.
From RM12 to follow a TikTok creator to RM15 just to like a YouTube channel, you can earn easy money by doing some very simple jobs. To the gullible users, these appear to be a heaven-sent opportunity to get rich very quickly. They somehow believe this is a social media hype job, which pays RM150 – RM300 every day. That’s about RM9,000 every month.
The story was quite convincing. Not only the job is super-duper easy, it also pays incredibly well simply because the celebrities on TikTok want to increase their popularity. Therefore, they need more “Likes” and “Followers” and are willing to pay you to be popular. The trick was to convince you that the job offers flexible hours, is easy to do and doesn’t interfere with your daily job or activities.
If you’re lucky, you may be scammed a few thousand Ringgit. If not, you may be tricked into downloading some software that could take over your smartphone and access your banking accounts and risk losing every single penny. Either way, your hard-earned money will be gone. The scammers are preying on people’s ignorance, desperation and greediness.
Some thought they could scam the scammers by doing a few jobs, before quitting when required to do premium tasks, the level where the real scam kicks in. However, one has to ask whether it’s worth revealing your banking account information just to pocket RM100-RM200. But the scammers were willing to lose a small amount of money to catch a bigger pool of “water fish”.
Recently, there was a 50-year-old self-employed man in Terengganu who lost RM13,460 in an online job scam, where he was asked to like and subscribe some YouTube videos and channels. The scam began when he received a WhatsApp message from an unknown number offering an irresistible job opportunity – potentially earning up to RM800 daily, translating to RM24,000 monthly.
While there are various types of scams, the game plan remains the same. First, they would try to bait you with jobs that pay you between RM5 and RM20. To lure you to swallow the hook, line and sinker, the scammer will quickly – and happily – pay you at the initial stage. Like a pyramid scheme, the payout gets bigger as you proceed. But you need to pay a deposit to play the game.
Just like a casino, you get addicted at every level as your confidence level – as well as your greed level – grows. Initially, the victims would be assigned the first three jobs and receive the promised payment of RM15 each. This is to create confidence, and the victims would take up new tasks which pay RM20 each for the fourth and fifth tasks. This is where the greed kicks in.
To grab a larger prize of RM130, you must complete a sixth task, but a deposit of RM100 must be made. Some scams categorise this as a business task, advanced level, VIP level and whatnot. Whenever you are required to bank in the deposit to proceed to the next level, you should smell “scam”. However, the 30% profit (paying RM100 to win RM130) will trap many victims.
Below is an example of cash rewards at different levels of the scam. Notice that the return remains at 30%, yet the deposit amount skyrockets and the risk of losing money explodes. The simple job of liking and subscribing to some YouTube channels has become a gamble. The game was to reward you with a few hundred but slaughter you when you reach the level of thousands in profit.
- VIP1 RM 100 Cashback RM 130 (newcomer benefit)
- VIP2 RM 300 Cashback RM 390 (group profit)
- VIP3 RM 500 Cashback RM 650 (group profit)
- VIP4 RM 1000 Cashback RM 1300 (group profit)
- VIP5 RM 1500 Cashback RM 1950 (group profit)
- VIP6 RM 2000 Cashback RM 2600 (group profit)
- VIP7 RM 2500 Cashback RM 3250 (group profit)
- VIP8 RM 3000 Cashback RM 3900 (group profit)
- VIP9 RM 5000 Cashback RM 6500 (group profit)
- VIP10 RM 10000 Cashback RM 13000 (group profit)
By design, a victim will somehow make mistakes and will be required to transfer more money to the scammer to fix it so that he/she can proceed to the next lucrative tasks. Like any gambler who is desperate to recover losses, the victim will resort to borrowing money from family members or friends to deposit more money to take on more tasks.
The scam reveals itself when the victim is informed that money cannot be withdrawn and credited to his account, despite having made deposits, because of failure to complete the tasks assigned. Other scams would require the victim to invest in cryptocurrencies after completing the initial easy tasks, only to be asked to invest thousands of Ringgit to recover what he/she had been promised.
From the beginning, there were many red flags of a scam the moment a victim was included in a Telegram or WhatsApp group. For example, one of the scams involved the Nookcha Production WhatsApp group with more than 200 dubious members. Others may disguise it as a legitimate company. Very few would take the trouble to call the company to verify its authentication.
The first red flag was the phone number of the WhatsApp group creator, which in the case of Nookcha Production, has a country code of Andorra. And when you drill into the 200 so-called members of the group, more phone numbers from Africa, like the Republic of Congo or Kenya were unveiled. Even when the phone numbers are local, the owners do not appear to be local.
Once you’re in the group, the administrator will actively promote the part-time or home-based job vacancies. Describing how the (scam) company works with YouTubers to help promote their channels to increase “Likes” and to get more subscribers, the scammer will repeatedly ask everyone to click on a YouTube link, “like” the video and send the screenshot to him – personally – to claim RM15 instantly.
To make it more dramatic and believable, you will see some group members actively post screenshots of payments received. Hilariously, if you stay long enough in the group to watch how the scam works, the same actor/actress would appear periodically – obviously to convince newly added members – with proof of payments. This is another glaring red flag.
The administrator would happily congratulate the scammers-in-partner, and like a broken record, encourage them to proceed to the next task in a tactic to earn the trust of gullible members. Newly joined members who raise suspicion of a scam would get their messages deleted, before being kicked out of the group. Another red flag is that the scammer will refuse to talk to you over the phone.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, let alone free cash. And when there is cash being given away, chances are they are scams which you should avoid with a 10-foot pole. Even if you think you were smart to scam the scammers, the small payments paid to you are not worth the confidential information you exposed – contact info, name, banking details and other personal information. – Finance Twitter