Malaysia is shaping up to be the new base of operations for online scam operations targeted at women in the United States, with US officials saying African con men setting up shop here.
Reuters‘s Stuart Grudgings reports that the con men, who mostly hail from Nigeria, enter Malaysia with student visas and take advantage of the country’s reliable, fast, and affordable broadband Internet services to prey on middle-aged American women, targeting them on dating websites before swindling them of their savings – in some cases, out of hundreds of thousands of US dollars.
US officials say the scams perpetrated by the Malaysia-based con men are more sophisticated than most operations in their home country of Nigeria. This is in part helped by Malaysia’s more advanced banking system, which allows scammers to quickly set up accounts and receive international transfers.
These US officials also say the Royal Malaysian Police (PDRM) lack the resources and expertise to handle the nature and volume of these online scams, and that to date, there have been no prosecutions of an online scam case involving a US victim in Malaysia.
Tim Scherer, consul general at the US Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, says complaints about these online scams now make up more than 80% of inquiries to the embassy’s duty officers, with about a dozen new cases reported every week.
“These are not rich widows who are being preyed on, these are middle-class Americans who don’t have this kind of money to spare,” he said. “It can really transform their lives in a very terrible way.”
The U.S. embassy estimates that U.S. victims are losing several million dollars a year, with two women in the past 12 months losing more than $250,000 each. There are more than 600 cases a year, and the amount lost by each victim averages in the tens of thousands of dollars, it said.
Nigerian online scammers have taken advantage of Malaysia’s drive to become a regional education hub, using student visas to enroll in private colleges here. However, Scherer believes it is unlikely that many of the Nigerians in Malaysia are not genuine students.
“Once in the country as students, there’s very little effort to verify their studies,” he said.
As of March this year, there were 9,146 Nigerians in Malaysia on student visas according to the Education Ministry, out of a total of 123,000 foreign students.
An Education Ministry representative said that last year it tightened its vetting and tracking of overseas students.
“We are aware of problems with some international students, especially Nigerians,” the official said.
