The official term for “voice phishing” in Malay is not what we expected

Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) has revealed what the official term in Malay is for the term “vishing”—or “voice phishing”. The term, shown in an Instagram post, caught me by surprise as it’s very different from what “phishing” is in Malay.

The term for phishing—which can be used for different types of fraudulent activities to trick a person into revealing sensitive information—is officially “memancing data” or “pancing data” in Malay. It uses the word “pancing” which literally means fishing, and the word “data” which is the same word in English. So, naturally, I would have expected the term vishing or voice phishing to have the same type of fishing-related term.

But lo and behold—the official term for vishing is “penipuan panggilan”. It roughly translates to something like “fake call” or a “scam call” if you really take it literally.

It’s not a bad term at all. In fact, the term makes a lot of sense as it’s pretty literal. The term is also extremely similar to the Malay version of smishing or SMS phishing—which is “penipuan SMS”.

But I was admittedly a little more surprised to find out is that there are actual terms in English for voice phishing (vishing) and SMS phishing (smishing). I’ve never seen them used anywhere, and the word phishing can still be used for the different kinds of scams anyway.

The agency has added quite a few technology-related terms already. One of them is the term for earbuds—which I think is absolutely wild. There are also terms like ‘tatal lara‘ (doomscrollling), and ‘tunafoto‘ (photobomb). 

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