31 August 2021 The online platform Facebook needs to act against those using it as a marketplace to advertise fake vaccine certificates. Cyrus Vance, New York’s District attorney, made the call when announcing that his force had cracked a ring promoting these documents. Vance was bringing charges against Jasmine Clifford …
Interview with Kasit Piromya, a Thai diplomat, Democrat Party politician, and former People’s Alliance for Democracy (“Yellow Shirts”) activist. He was Foreign Minister of Thailand from 2008 to 2011. Your statement about the ASEAN failure to deliver anything on Myanmar is important. It is now six months since the coup. Is it your fear that Myanmar is heading towards breakdown and …
Terrorist financing in Afghanistan must now be key Western focus Western intelligence services will need to start to wake up to the numerous threats posed by Afghanistan’s Taliban, with an alacrity that they seemed woefully lacking while NATO was [reputedly] trying to build a democratic system in Kabul. Their immediate …
Introduction: Two routes forward: Two divergent routes present themselves to Malaysia’s politicians seeking to decide Malaysia’s new political direction, now that Muhyiddin Yassin and his extreme Bersatu government have handed in their cards. The first is broadly more of the same, an UMNO leader who can bring his party together, …
Phone and text scams have mushroomed during the pandemic. Messages such as those from fraudulent couriers that ask for administrative fees to deliver non-existent parcels surged by 83 per cent in the past year. This may sound a slightly esoteric form of fraud but it has been fueled by the …
Minister Khairy Jamaluddin, the Minister in charge of Malaysia’s vaccination programme, spoke to us on 23 July. This is update on the state of Malaysia’s vaccination programme. Malaysia Watch Could you tell us about Malaysia’s vaccination progress please? KJ: We hope to have 40% of the population fully vaccinated by …
COVID-19 business email compromise fraud Companies seeking to buy protective material against Covid have paid over €1 million to an African gang working on behalf of Romanian gangsters. The gang used bogus emails to persuade the companies to pay money upfront for goods that never arrived. On 10 August, 23 …
The details of an extraordinary deal for the sale of ventilators to Hungary have been revealed to journalists in Malaysia and Hungary. Under pressure of pandemic, the Malaysian businessman Vinod Sekhar sold at least 800 ventilators to the Government of Hungary for a figure close to $60m. It has been …
Quick rich merchants have profiteered from the vaccine market as never before during the pandemic. Take the case of Hungarian company Danubia Pharma. This is owned (according to Direct36 which broke the story) by a private limited company called Syntonite Med which is owned by a small time consultant with …
UK Border officials find a hundred fake test Coronavirus certificate a day, a UK Border official has said. But many slip through the net because they are unable to check them. This is especially the case when they are written in a foreign language. Lucy Moreton, professional officer for the …
