A Review of Phone Scam Activities in Malaysia

Telecommunication system and infrastructure are becoming more sophisticated and ubiquitous. This has provided significant benefits at lower cost for communication especially by using facilities such as Voice over IP. However, this situation has opened up systems to increased security threats. One such threat is phone scam, which is getting increasingly serious and has the potential to become even worse if no remedial action is taken by stakeholders including phone users, researchers and authorities. This threat is more to social crime rather than technical kind of threat but it needs technical to achieve their objective. We noted that government agencies and private sectors have provided awareness, safety campaign and guidelines to protect all phone users from scam but these have proven to be inadequate. There are several very useful related studies but most of them have scalability issues and they are very depending on public to provide input data. In this paper, we show three scenarios of scam tactics. Next, we suggest two preventive mechanisms in order to protect phone users from scammers. Then, we plan to propose a framework that be built in order to combat against such scamming activities.