IF there is a "home-made" pharmaceutical or health supplement that avows fairer skin, facial beautification, youthful elixir and treatment for incurable diseases, many Malaysians will splurge serious money on these products, the efficacy be damned.
Add questionable medical devices to that list of quackery and Malaysians' spending prowess on dubious beauty, health and wellbeing merchandise is almost legendary. Like their online banking brethren, too many Malaysians get sucked into a hyperbolic sales pitch.
The outcome is inevitable: consumers bitterly complain about the merchandise's laughable repellence.
In the pre-Internet years, the city's main street was filled with peddlers and snake oil salesmen hawking dubious pills, creams and ointments. Thanks to periodic enforcement blitz, the hucksterism has mostly disappeared but don't be fooled. The peddlers have evolved into a bustling "black market": reselling through e-commerce behemoths.
Their product line is mind-bogglingly diverse and enterprising, from the traditional to the esoteric, to even plugging spectacular "cures" for complex and incurable diseases.
Beauty entrepreneurs have glamorised their business, hiring celebrities and launching glitzy commercials that promote skin-whitening cream and cosmetics that can "Koreanise" your appearance.
Entrepreneurs operate shrewdly in the grey area between legitimacy and lawlessness that's out of the Health Ministry's jurisdiction. Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad admitted as much: instead of direct enforcement against the charlatans, he could only muster a "request" to the behemoth e-commerce sites to de-list regulatory flouters.
It's a tall order, even for these global behemoths: despite deploying super algorithms to detect and disable links to questionable products.
E-commerce sites have proposed a Health Ministry goods certificate database to coordinate detection, but the transactions are costly and taxing.
As an immediate alternative, the ministry could collaborate with its domestic trade and cost of living counterpart, the latter outfitted with the enforcement muscle to indict dodgy sellers, but the two ministries aren't communicating just yet.
Here's how the Health Ministry should approach online quackery's "Wild, Wild West". Instead of going after sellers, go after the buyers, at least to win their hearts and minds. Apply the same tactics banks employ to warn customers of online scams, phishing and get-rich-quick and pyramid schemes.
Publicise narratives of buyers' remorse, especially those whose health deteriorated after digesting or massaging the dodgy products.
Set up online bulletins exposing all known grift and their commodities. Mirror their sales pitch, but hammer it with a clear caution, like what's done with cigarette packs.
It's time the hucksters get a dose of their own bad mojo. Still, the ultimate solution is already locked and loaded. Buyers' personal vigilance, but time after time, they lapse and are facilely duped, especially with sellers' flaunting of crass luxury. With hordes of cash and materialism being brazenly flashed, their quack products must be super effective, no? That's a mission for the Inland Revenue Board.