Even though more than six months have passed ever since it happened, I still shake as I recall how it happened.
On a fine day, I received a text message from an ‘agent’ on WhatsApp asking if I was looking for additional income, and that they were from a world-renowned advertising agency. They even had a website and all. I asked to learn more about the job scope. It was pretty easy - I'd just need to follow certain YouTube profiles, and for every profile I followed, I'd earned RM10. The induction tasks were to follow three different accounts and they transferred me RM30 almost immediately. All these transactions were conducted with the ‘agent’ on WhatsApp until they asked me to join a Telegram group if I was interested to continue doing so. There was an admin assigned to each person that joined the chat.
I joined the Telegram chat, and there were a few hundred people already in it. The rules and instructions stated clearly that there were to be 30 tasks each day, and in between there would be some special tasks (they used a different term, but I can't recall what it was). To withdraw your earned income from following YouTube pages, you must complete at least one special task a day. On the get-go, they never mentioned what these tasks were in the main Telegram group.
Continuing with the tasks, the time for the special task finally came and I was curious about it, therefore I asked my admin to include me in it. I was then asked to wait and would be put into a separate, smaller Telegram group chat with about five or so people. Once I was in, the ‘teacher’, who's the one conducting the special task operations, sent a message about several packages - the more money you put in, the higher your returns. As I was a newbie, I went for the lowest package - at that time, it didn't matter much to me because the amount was still relatively small and negligible, about RM100. By that time, I already earned more than that from the YouTube tasks, so it was more to fulfil my curiosity. However, there were other participants in the group (who I realised were probably accomplices much after) that liked to guilt trip others by taking on the largest package, claiming that you'd regret it if you didn't. After banking in the money, I was asked to sign up on some sort of trading platform and perform a transaction, guided by the ‘teacher’s instructions. After I completed it successfully, the promised returns were banked into my account. This was the start of my impending doom.
Things were going on as usual until another special task one day. This time, we needed to complete three transactions at once going to be able to be eligible for the promised returns. Funnily, all the accounts that were used to perform the transactions had different holders - some were companies, and some were individuals. After the second one, I made a mistake in the trading platform and was given an earful by the ‘teacher’ about it. In order to fix it, I needed to perform two more large sum transactions - one which I completed before being unable to complete the second one as it was RM50,000. When I informed the ‘teacher’ that I could not do it, he tried guilt-tripping me once more about how much I would be losing, before I blocked his Telegram account. Apologies if this explanation is rather short, as I'm still quite traumatised by how fast yet slow it happened.
At that time, my mind was so clouded as I'd just lost a huge part of my savings (I'm only in my 20s), that all I could do was reach out to friends to help me with this payment. After a few days of hell trying to figure out how to get my money back, my parents (with more money management experience of course) helped me understand and accept that what's gone is gone. There was nothing I could do to get my money back - even if I lodged a police report, it wouldn't be helpful because I technically did make those transfers of my own free will. The only thing left to do was to accept, learn, and let go. My parents were glad that I was at least safe and sound, and not threatened by any ah longs or whatsoever.
This is one of the worst experiences in my life, and I'm not proud of it. Sharing my experiences here so that everyone else will be able to learn from my mistakes and avoid such scammers in the future.
