Bank Negara Malaysia: RM1.9bn of fraud stopped in six months of 2026
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readAbdul Rasheed Ghaffour, Governor of Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), used a special address at the 16th International Conference on Financial Crime and Counter Terrorism Financing in Kuala Lumpur on 6 October 2026 — published by the BIS on 13 October — to take stock of 25 years of Malaysia's anti-money-laundering law and to describe where fraud prevention goes next.
What 25 years of AMLA delivered, by BNM's count. The Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing, Anti-Restricted Activity Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act 2001 (AMLA) has been amended several times and now covers more than 27,000 financial and non-financial reporting institutions. The governor credited coordination bodies such as the National Anti-Financial Crime Centre and the National Scam Response Centre, five national money-laundering and terrorism-financing risk assessments and a positive 2025 mutual evaluation. The figures given: in the first half of 2026 alone, the financial sector prevented about RM1.9 billion of attempted fraudulent transactions, against RM1.2 billion in the whole of 2025, and more than RM37 billion of assets were recovered over the past five years.
The threat picture. The governor described AI as changing how criminals operate — deepfakes that mimic voices and faces, including a deepfake video showing the governor arguing with a guest on live TV. About 95% of online fraud cases now involve victims who are deceived into transferring the money themselves. Citing INTERPOL, the address put AI-enabled fraud at 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods.
The mule-account pilot. Since October 2025, Malaysia's National Fraud Portal has piloted analysis of payment network patterns to find potential mule accounts. So far PayNet has flagged more than 1,600 suspicious accounts, many later assessed as carrying mule-related risk, which the governor presented as evidence for network-level intelligence.
What comes next. BNM has revised its Risk Management in Technology policy and recently issued a policy on Financial Institutions' Response to Fraud. Building on those, banks and PayNet are working on industry-wide fraud alerts that warn banks and customers before a transaction is completed, prompting them to pause and verify. The governor acknowledged openly that this adds friction for customers and argued it is needed to move fraud management from reactive to predictive and, ultimately, preventive. Ghaffour also called for more structured private-to-private information sharing and stronger international cooperation.
Source: Bank Negara Malaysia, Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour, "Intelligence-led financial crime prevention: the power of data, insights and collaboration", special address, Kuala Lumpur, 6 October 2026 (BIS central bankers' speeches) — https://www.bis.org/speeches/20261013-intelligence-led-financial-crime-prevention-power-data-insights-and-collaboration