KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian police have received more than five requests from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) over the past two years to assist in the bureau’s investigations into child pornography activities in the country, Bukit Aman said.

Commercial Crime Investigation Department deputy director (Cyber Crime & Multimedia Investigation) SAC Mohd Kamaruddin Md Din said the requests were made in 2013 and last year, to help FBI trace Malaysian Internet Protocol (IP) addresses found accessing child porn websites.

“The FBI detected several IP addresses from Malaysia and requested if we could help trace and locate the perpetrators,” said Kamaruddin.

However, Kamaruddin said police faced difficulties in solving such cases because the perpetrators used proxy servers to access the illegal sites.

A proxy server allows clients to make indirect network connections to other network services.

“We could not track them. But whenever we receive requests from FBI, we will do our part to assist them as best as we can,” said Kamaruddin.

He said so far, FBI is the only enforcement agency which has made such requests to the police.

“Child porn or anything related to it is one of the issues that they are really serious about. They can monitor everything. They have the records, visitor traffic, etc. Everything.

“So when we received a tip-off and they wanted us to facilitate, we do what we can. So far, we have not charged anyone but if we have more information, we will share it with the FBI,” said Kamaruddin.

His statement comes a month after Bukit Aman’s Sexual, Women and Child Investigation Division assistant principle director ACP Ong Chin Lan reportedly said police were in the midst of setting up a child cybersex crime unit to snare paedophiles and sex offenders who preyed on children online.

The unit will be under Ong’s division.

She told The Star Online then that because paedophiles and child pornographers operated underground, police needed tip-offs from the public.

She said child pornography and paedophilia were two areas which posed a big challenge for them as the reach was wide but tough to tackle because the vice operated underground.

Ong also told the news portal that police wanted a Sexual Offenders Registration Act to allow them to regulate the movement of sex offenders, particularly paedophiles who have served their jail sentence.

This followed the arrest of a Malaysian student in United Kingdom for possessing thousands of kiddie porn clips. — The Malaysian Insider

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on July 14, 2015.