Disclaimer: In Real Life is a platform for everyday people to share their experiences and voices. All articles are personal stories and do not necessarily echo In Real Life’s sentiments.
Behind a Google Meet call with a disabled camera on his end, Ahmad* is telling me how he made nearly RM100,000 through phone calls.
“It was easy money,” he told IRL, detailing how he went from not being able to afford 3 meals a day to being able to wear designer clothes.
From a modest background, Ahmad made his living by defrauding innocent victims at the other end of a phone.
“To become a rock star we have to do something,” he said.
“Become a thief?” I asked.
“Exactly that,” he replied coolly.
Ahmad hops onto a call with me from a friend’s apartment, where his group of comrades carry out day-to-day call scams. The group of young men I’ve come to talk to all have one thing in common: they’ve all previously worked in at least one scam-call company.
Ahmad has been doing this job for 9 years after leaving university
“I wasn’t getting a job anywhere else and the money and incentives were good so, needless to say, I was motivated,” he said.
The company Ahmad worked for ran what is known as a “tech support scam”. It would send a pop-up to people’s screens, telling them their computer had been infected by a “pornographic virus” or other malware, giving them a helpline number to call.
As panicking customers rang in, Ahmad and his colleagues would milk them for money to fix a problem that didn’t actually exist. He tells me that tricking people is an “art”.
“We used to target the old people,” he said. “There are many old people in Malaysia who don’t have families, are alone and disabled, so it’s very easy to trick them.”
I looked at this man sitting opposite me in his baggy jeans and hipster t-shirt and wondered how he could be so cold-hearted. How would he feel if his own grandparents were victims of scamming, I asked.
“Yeah, I will feel bad, but I did it because I was desperate for money and that’s it.”
“One time, I forced a woman to hand over her last RM250 just so I could meet a target. I took that money to have some extra cash while she cried a lot as she made the payment. Yeah, that was probably the worst call I ever had.”
Ahmad went on to set up his own call centre
He told me that it was easy. He turned the apartment he and his friends were living in into a home office and told his landlord he was starting a marketing firm.
As the boss, Ahmad was constantly thinking of new ways to con customers out of cash. He drew up a script for another fraudulent scheme, known as the EPF scam, which involved cold-calling Malaysians and telling them they’d get a tax refund of thousands if they first handed over RM200.
“We used to tell them that the police would go to their house and arrest them if they didn’t pay!”
When he first started out, Ahmad was paid 5% for every ringgit he made in sales. So for an RM100 scam, he’d get RM5.
But once he became the boss the money flooded in. Some “lucky” months he took home RM25,000.
“I was making more money than an MBA graduate”
Another ex-scammer, Sam*, got into the business unintentionally.
Sam was looking for his first job and he had a friend who told him about a place where he could earn good money without working too hard.
At the interview he was told it was a sales job, pitching products to customers. It was only while he was being trained in how to talk to customers that he realised what he was getting into.
“After a month, when we actually made it to the floor, when we were supposed to go live, that’s when we figured out the entire thing was a scam,” he tells me.
By that point, Sam felt it was too late to back out.
“I was making a lot of money and I don’t have a college degree,” he remembered.
“I used to drink a lot, party a lot… What are you going to do with all that money when you literally don’t have any future plans?”
Sam wrestled with his conscience but told himself he was only targeting the wealthy
“I just had to be sure that the customers weren’t handing me the money for their food… so I always used to pitch to the big guys who can afford it,” he said.
He could work someone’s income out from “the way they talk, the sort of things they have on their computer”.
“Is it OK to steal from people if you think they can afford it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he replied confidently.
Sam said that his high salary won him respect from his father, whom he no longer had to rely on for cash.
But his father – and friends – didn’t know how he had come into such wealth. “When they asked what I did, I told them I worked for an IT company as a salesman,” he says.
*For illustration purposes only
Source: The Star
Six months into the job, the call centre Sam worked at was raided by the police and was forced to shut down. Sam escaped arrest and within days secured employment in another similar business.
His bosses were detained for less than a day and he believes they restarted the business under a different name. It’s easy for such companies to operate under the radar, he told me, which is why they continue to do so.
Unlike Sam, Ahmad didn’t hide his job from his family – they were proud of his income
“I told them everything. They knew I was earning a lot and were pleased,” he said.
But after close to a decade of scamming he too quit, in fear of police crackdowns. He feels lucky he never got caught and now regrets his actions.
“I felt good at the time,” he told me. “In hindsight, it doesn’t feel as good.”
Ahmad used his earnings to set up other legal businesses – but ended up losing it all.
“After that, it didn’t go right, so I would say it was karma.”
Sam now has a job with a reputable tech company and has long left the world of scamming. He said he decided to talk to me openly to appeal to others like him to pursue legal jobs, which offer better prospects in the long term – and where you don’t run the risk of arrest.
* Names have been changed for anonymity
For more stories like this, read: Beware: I Was Scammed Out Of RM 1,100 When Someone Pretended To Be My Boss and I Sniff Out Charity Scammers – Here’s How We Sort Out the Real Cases From the Fake
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