Cabinet to consider Online Safety Bill soon

Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister's Department (Law and Institutional Reform) M. Kulasegaran said the Bill intends to ensure a safe online environment for Malaysians, particularly children.

He added that the Bill would, among other things, impose responsibility on service providers to remove any content reported as harmful.

"Under this new law, online financial crimes will be classified as serious content and prioritised. If the content is reported as an online financial crime, the platform provider is obligated to remove the content temporarily until a further investigation is completed," he said during the question-and-answer session in the Dewan Rakyat.

He was responding to a supplementary question from Lim Lip Eng (PH-Kepong) about how the draft Online Safety Bill could help combat online crimes.

In response to Lim's initial question on the number of scam victims, Kulasegaran said that the National Scam Response Centre (NSRC) recorded 131,036 calls, of which 52,836 were from scam victims, with combined losses amounting to RM302.1 million.

Regarding police powers to temporarily block banking transactions, he explained that the government had amended Acts 574 and 593 to address online crimes related to mule accounts, with new provisions granting police officers the authority to seize funds held in any financial institution suspected of being linked to criminal activities.

He said the amendments to Act 593 included a new Section 16D and related provisions, which grant police officers ranked Sergeant and above the power to seize or block such funds held in payment instruments or accounts at financial institutions.

"This amendment allows the police not only to seize but to also prevent further transactions to block the movement of funds from mule accounts, thus complementing existing provisions, such as Section 435 of Act 593, which relates to the police's power to seize property suspected of being stolen (including from scams) that is more focused on physical assets.

"In such cases, the police can block transactions if they have reasonable grounds to suspect that a crime has been committed, that the property has been or is intended to be used for criminal purposes, or to believe that the property is evidence of a crime," he said.

-- BERNAMA