Kota Kinabalu: Every so often, while going through her daughter’s phone, a woman in Kota Kinabalu noticed the same thing.
Messages from a stranger. A conversation that kept going. She noticed her 14-year-old daughter no longer wanted to join family outings, preferring instead to stay alone in her room.
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This case happened 10 years ago, long before online grooming was widely understood, before artificial intelligence made deception on messaging apps easier still.
“The woman eventually found on her daughter’s phone that she had been interacting with a stranger on WeChat,” said Heldora Hong
(pic), who was a Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) complaints officer in Kota Kinabalu at the time.
Heldora, now the MCMC Keningau Director, said the worried parent came to her with the phone.
“It was discovered that the stranger had requested and groomed her daughter to send naked photos of her (daughter) to the stranger. And that is ridiculous. The daughter was just 14,” Heldora said.
The stranger, it turned out, was an adult in his 20s who had spent time posing as a teenager close to the girl’s own age.
Now, a decade later, many of the same warning signs Heldora once traced through a single family’s phone are being chased at a national scale.
“This case is far from isolated. This is really happening in Malaysia,” she said.
Nationwide operations conducted between 2024 and 2026 have uncovered about 1.47 million digital files and led to the detention of 117 individuals linked to online child sexual exploitation and paedophilia activities.
The most recent, Op Cyber Guardian 2026, conducted from April 6 to April 8 this year and resulted in the seizure of 498,694 digital files, including 204,934 identified as child sexual abuse material.
She pointed to how children are being given phones at increasingly younger ages, sometimes as early as three, a pattern she has observed firsthand in restaurants and coffee shops.
The risks that follow, she said, range from harmful content and grooming to cyberbullying, online scams and unsafe interactions with strangers, often surfacing through ordinary platform features such as algorithmic recommendations and private messaging.
“Even seemingly harmless platforms are not free from risk,” she said, pointing to how algorithm-driven advertisements on sites such as Facebook can push inappropriate or adult content to users, including children, without warning.
She said the MCMC continues to work closely with the police and other enforcement agencies to identify offenders and dismantle online child exploitation networks through coordinated operations such as Op Pedo 2.0 and Op Cyber Guardian, resulting in seized digital evidence, opened investigation papers and criminal prosecutions.
“The MCMC also works directly with platform providers including Facebook, TikTok and Instagram to remove harmful content swiftly,” she said.
Between January 1 and May 31 this year, the MCMC requested the removal of 36 pieces of harmful content under the Online Safety Act 2025, of which 35 were taken down, a 97 per cent compliance rate.
“The cases involved financial scams, cyber harassment, incestuous content and hate speech,” she said.
