A month ago, Lee Hui Ling, 22, from Taman Johor Jaya, Johor Bahru, died after she was in a coma for a week due to serious injuries when she was dragged out from her car by a group of car jackers.

This time, Lee Hoon Hwa, 21, from Taman Skudai was brutally stabbed by robbers who came through the roof of her double-storey house. It was believed that Hoon Hwa put up a fight with the robbers before being fatally stabbed in her abdomen.

Sunday Star

KUANTAN: Stop responding to scams and they will die a natural death.

Deputy Internal Security Minister Datuk Fu Ah Kiow said many complaints had been received about Internet investment scams and no amount of enforcement by his ministry could stop criminals from finding new ways to cheat the public.

“These unscrupulous people are never short of tricks to dupe the gullible ones and these scams will keep on recurring but in different forms.

“The police are prepared to take action but the most important thing is for the public not to fall prey to such scams,” he added.

It boiled down to the people themselves who were greedy and wanted fast and easy money - a fact that con men exploited, Fu said.

“When there is demand, there is supply,” he added, responding to questions on the latest e-investment scam - buy-e-barrel - which abruptly closed, leaving thousands of investors in the lurch over several million ringgit.

In order to kill off such scams, the public were the ones with the power by simply not responding to such activities, he said.

“If the public do not believe in it, it will fail by itself,” he added.

He also said that anything related to cyberspace came under the jurisdiction of the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission and the police would intervene if there was a whiff of criminal activity.

“If there are criminal elements, it will come under the Commercial Crime Department,” he told reporters after presenting donations by the Association of Wives of Ministers and Deputy Ministers (Bakti) to five Fourth Formers from schools here yesterday.

Fu, who is Kuantan MP, gave the donations on behalf of his wife Datin Chang Mun Lin to the students who scored good results in the Penilaian Menengah Rendah examination.

This is not the first time I am writing about this. Perhaps not even the 2nd time, I can’t remember. But recently, chain messages and bulletins spread in Friendster again. As usual, most of these chain messages require you to forward to your friends within x minutes, otherwise, some bad luck is said to happen, and these include claims that “you will get murdered” and in some distasteful ones, it even claims that “your mom will die in x hours”.

Come on, I have ignored and deleted all these useless messages but nothing happened, alright? Why not we all play our role and ignore all these messages? By ignoring them, nothing will happen to you or your family, ok? And best of all, we get to save Internet resources for more useful transmission of data. And also save the computing resources of Friendster web servers and database servers which have been overloaded and work slowly at times.

To those who always forward them and so gullible to believe the contents of these chain messages, don’t you think it is distasteful to claim that the recipient or the recipient’s mom will die if one does not forward the message? Think again.