The hottest scam right now during this lockdown in Malaysia is the LHDN (Lembaga Hasil dalam Negeri Malaysia) phishing scam. The fact that many people around me are getting such calls is proof the the scam is very effective and profitable for scammers to operate. I think this LHDN phishing scam ranks number 2 after Macau scams.
The highest loss I've seen is RM1.2 million while the usual amount ranges from RM10,000 - RM300,000.
The LHDN scam calls that come in are ultra realistic and it is done by organized crime syndicates, the entire scam operation is very elaborate and well planned.
The 1st call in will be from a phone number with an automated voice robot telling "Panggilan ini dari LHDN, akaun anda mempunyai tunggakan". There are 2 reasons for using the voice robot. Firstly it creates legitimacy to the call as if it's from the government department itself (using Malaysia's national language). Secondly, the voice robot filters out people who cut off the line before passing it to the actual human operator (scammer).
The calls from LHDN that comes in will typically be someone pretending to be an LHDN desk officer calling in to say that your name has been implicated in a scam by someone else and your account number was used in the process. The scam is so real that the desk officer can even produce a copy of the charge warrant, police report of the so called person indicted in the scam.
The 1st step of the scam is to scare the victim 1st and then to act like wanting to help the victim using sympathy.
The charges read by the scammer varies but centers around these themes :
2) Illegal activities involving tax evasion and money laundering
3) Tax investigation
4) Profits from share trading
5) Frauds
6) Tax refunds.
The 2nd step once the victim is convinced is to probe the victim's assets by asking victim to declare all his assets like stock holdings, fixed deposits, mutual funds under the guise of correctly identifying the victim's identity. Once the victim's assets is made known, the scammer would know how big the "fish" is and roughly will know how much to extort from the victim.
The 3rd step is the crucial one whereby they will try to use social engineering tactics to coerces the victim to reveal his banking details and make deposits to the scammer's mule accounts. Mule accounts are just bank accounts of some random person being promised a commission to use their account as an intermediate account before transferring to the actual scammer's account.
Everyone, do beware of calls from people claiming to be from LHDN. Together we can stop this scam at its heels.
Your phone number is assumed to be in some database system for scam callers, customer phone numbers are all leaked out to scammers from call centers. I've seen people selling software called dailers whereby you input a list phone numbers with names and then the software will dail each person one by one and pass the call to the scammer. The whole scamming system also seems to be package sold on the dark web, industry insiders call it scamming as a service whereby scammers can buy the whole package (phone script) with leaked phone numbers. Therefore I believe this scam cannot be directly pinpointed to a particular scammer group but instead it belongs to a few unrelated groups who bought these scam packages over the dark web (internet marketplace).
Below are phone numbers obtained from the web on the records of phone numbers used to scam people: :
📍Link
https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2021/09/21/software-engineer-loses-over-rm12mil-in-macau-scam