It was last year when a Malaysian Minister accused bloggers as liars. According to him out of 8000 of 10,000 unemployed bloggers are women and bloggers have nothing better to do than spreading rumors to disunite the country. Some even resorted to labeling bloggers as Monkeys, Gobloks and Pondan.

Such comments may stem from the lack of understanding of the blogging medium. A medium which may have played a role in the shocking outcome witnessed during the recent general election.

As announced by the Malaysian Securities Commission (SC) recently, they have now started to block access to several illegal investment scheme websites. This measure started yesterday, Monday 11 Jun 2007. At the time of this writing, the popular ones such as SwissCash.net and SwissMutualFund.Biz are no longer accessible from within Malaysia.

If data from Alexa.com can be taken into account, Malaysian is by far the largest group of investors in Swiss Cash

Without them, the scheme is already dead. I believe the majority of these investors do not know how to use proxy servers to get around this restriction. Without fresh money coming in – it’s the end of the road for Swiss Cash.

Anyone who is not a US citizen, working on the Internet and get paid in US dollar is feeling the pinch of the weaker dollar.

At the same time, the local currency, Ringgit Malaysia is moving in the opposite direction and is getting stronger by the day. That means the checks I get from Google AdSense, or affiliate commissions from CJ worth less today than they were just a month ago.

If you are a blogger doing pay per post at your blog, you are actually making less money for the same amount of work.

According to an article published in The Star Online recently, Malaysia’s Securities Commission (SC) is going to block access to illegal investment schemes operated by some 60 websites after it received 720 complaints and queries.

However no mention on how this will be done and who are they going to work with (MCMC & Telekom?) in order to achieve the objective of preventing access to those websites.

Whether this measure will also block those who try to bypass the restriction by surfing via anonymous proxy will remain to be seen.

I always applaud the press for highlighting important issues that could help the public avoid scam websites in their excitement trying to generate extra income from the Internet.

But not this time, recently Utusan Online has published an article about several websites which according to MyCert, the Malaysian Computer Emergency Response Team are offering questionable investment schemes.

Pusat Keselamatan Siber Malaysia mengenal pasti 37 laman web yang dipercayai menawarkan aktiviti pelaburan skim cepat kaya melalui Internet berdasarkan aduan yang diterima daripada orang ramai dalam tempoh dua tahun lalu.

The New Strait Times has recently published a story about several Malaysian who are making money on the Internet. The article featured three full-time Malaysian Internet entrepreneurs namely Samsul Zamzuri Abu Bakar (Alang), Gobala Krishnan and Liew Cheon Fong.

This is the kind of story that inspires people as it proves to them that there are ways to make real money online without getting involved in the dangerously popular get rich quick schemes.

Alang’s five figures income is derived from more than 15 websites. He got several blogs where he hires bloggers from countries like the US , and New Zealand to write the content.

OK here’s another attempt from me to write a post in Malay. I hope this will benefit those searching for this info in Malay.

Saya telah menulis tentang panduan yang dikeluarkan oleh Suruhanjaya Sekuriti untuk membantu orang ramai mengenal pasti pelaburan palsu melalui Internet.

Dalam usaha saya menghasilkan pos tentang Swiss Cash dan pelaburan skim cepat kaya melalui Internet, saya telah terserempak dengan beberapa isu yang sering dijadikan alasan untuk terus melabur dalam skim sedemikian.

Mungkin pos ini tidak akan disenangi oleh sesetengah pembaca, tapi suka tak suka, inilah jawapan saya kepada persoalan yang sering diutarakan berkenaan dengan skim ini.

It looks like the recent failure to require bloggers to register with the government does not put a stop to their eagerness from coming up with another way to control web blogs.

Yesterday, Information Minister Datuk Seri Zainuddin Maidin proposes that the government has to classify web bloggers as professionals and non-professionals in an attempt to prevent ‘misuse of blog sites’.

He believed that professional bloggers were those who where more responsible in ensuring that their web content was based on the truth and not rumors. This certainly helps them in identifying bloggers that ‘have violated the country’s law.

The following is an abstract from Edisi Siasat a TV program from a local TV station, NTV7, about skim cepat kaya melalui Internet or the Internet get rich schemes.

This afternoon I checked my stats and found someone was spending more than an hour on the Malaysia Securities Commission Investor Alert List post.

Then later today I received an email from a lawyer who claimed to represent one of the companies in Malaysia Securities Commission (SC) Alert List.

The lawyer demanded that I remove certain companies from the list immediately or certain action will be taken ‘to compel this to take place’.

You know how legal sentences are worded – I had to read between the lines several times to really understand what it meant.