To put it plainly first: the Royal Malaysia Police has proposed amending the law to impose harsher penalties for online fraud, including caning. Azalina Othman Said, the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department in charge of law and institutional reform, said publicly that she has reviewed the proposal and supports tougher punishments for fraud-related offences.
However, she did not place all the emphasis simply on “hitting harder.” She said combating online fraud cannot rely only on increasing penalties; banks must also bear greater responsibility, especially in monitoring and blocking suspicious transactions, and they cannot keep shifting losses onto customers after something goes wrong. She also said that if an account is misused by others, banks cannot simply brush it off with a line like “you bear the risk yourself.”
Her point was very straightforward: Bank Negara has issued reminders, and the police have long urged people to stay alert, yet the number of victims is still rising. So the government now has to determine clearly whether heavier punishment is more effective, or whether tightening banks’ accountability mechanisms would do more to disrupt the fraud chain. When people there talk about this issue, what many care most about is not slogans, but whether, at the very moment the money is being transferred out, someone is there to stop it for you.
Earlier, police chief Mohamad Khalid Ismail also said that the existing relevant laws are already outdated, and that the punishments currently handed down by the courts are not strong enough to deter the masterminds behind fraud syndicates or the lower-level runners working under them. That is why the police proposed amending the law, and also put forward heavier punishments such as caning.
In the end, what people fear most is still this: the phone rings, a link is tapped, an account moves—and the savings are gone. Whether the law should be made harsher is now on the table; whether banks should share responsibility has also been pointed out directly by the minister.
