We called 9 shady massage numbers. Here’s how many picked up.

If you’ve spent any time walking the streets of any city in Malaysia, you’ll probably have seen phone numbers like these, advertising personal loans, massages, and other weird stuff:

You can find them scrawled, spraypainted, or printed on stickers that are then stuck to walls, toilet doors, lamp posts, TNB meter boxes – any surface people can get their grubby mitts on, really. This writer recalls seeing these phone numbers growing up in KL and never really thought about actually calling them, cuz duh, they’re dodgy. We’re sure most of y’all haven’t either. Well, curiosity has finally got the better of us, and we set out on a journey to collect as many shady phone numbers as we can from around the city.

Surprisingly, it’s very hard to find them nowadays

At first, we thought ‘Oh, we’ll just casually take a stroll in SS2 and get like 20 numbers’, but after skulking the back streets of SS2, Petaling Street, Changkat Bukit Bintang, SS15, and Bangsar with a Rolodex, we walked away with only nine numbers promising various types of massages and ubat kuat lelaki. Needless to say, we gave each of them a call, and… only one phone number yielded anything.

At first, we made the calls in the afternoon only to find out that eight of the numbers were “out of service”. We tried again at night around 10pm thinking that some of the phones were turned off during the day, given the nature of their purposes.

Nope, nothing. To be fair, some of the numbers looked pretty old, which might be why they’re not in use anymore.

The one person who did pick up spoke Mandarin and offered “ice and fire massage” for RM430 per hour, house calls only. For one thing, we know that legit massages cost less cuz the totally legit places we’ve been to (cough cough) charged us RM200 at most, and for the other, we were left wondering what “ice and fire massage” is. Some of the more obvious ones like “volcano massage” is obvious, but does “fire and ice” mean they cover your kukubird in chili oil and smother it in shaved ice after?

When this writer asked what the massage actually entails, the man hung up, perhaps suspecting us of being abang polis, and because…

If the PDRM catches you, there will be no happy ending

Let’s be real: most of the “massages” offered via phone numbers spraypainted on shop lot walls are probably sexual services in one form or another, and yes, you can get into trouble with the law if you get caught… partaking in said services. AskLegal’s got a more in-depth article on the whole thing, but basically, you can be sentenced to imprisonment for up to a year or get slapped with a fine under section 372B of the Penal Code:

Whoever solicits or importunes for the purpose of prostitution or any immoral purpose in any place shall be punished with imprisonment for a term not exceeding one year or with fine or with both.

Yeah, owners of massage parlors and people who run prostitution rings will kena also. There have been cases in the past where PDRM or local authorities raided these parlors and shut them down. And the best part? You don’t even have to be caught receiving sexual services to land in hot water; all you have to do is be there. That’s most likely why that one dude who picked up our call said they only do house calls.

In fact, we suspect that…

Most of these ads have probably gone online nowadays

We remember seeing a LOT more of these phone numbers before MCO, like, everywhere. We’d catch a glimpse of “cheese massage” or “volcano massage” out of the corner of our eye even if we didn’t want to, but their presence seem to have softened over the years (heh). So, what happened? One far-fetched theory we have is that these numbers have been cleaned up or scrubbed off during MCO, and not enough time has passed for enterprising individuals to put up their businesses’ numbers… yet.

The other theory is a bit more grounded: these services have simply moved online. Setting up a social media profile or website offering sexual services takes little to no effort in 2022. In fact, our editor’s dad receives a lot of these links either through unsolicited spam or via his uncle chat groups, and y’all might also have experienced this. We will, however, have to note that every time he receives one he shakes his head in disapproval.  Wait, the motion for shaking your head is up and down, right?