KUALA LUMPUR: Many may not know that one can lodge a complaint with the Domestic Trade and Cost of Living minister should food operators force its patrons to buy mineral water when they asked for filtered water.

This adds to the list of complaints that consumers can lodge if they are unhappy with the goods and services offered by traders through the Ez Adu mobile application.

Ez Adu is an application developed by the then Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry in 2015.

It allows consumers to file a complaint through their smartphones by filling up the complaint form and uploading photos or documents, such as receipts and items purchased, to support the complaint.

Complaints not within the ministry's jurisdiction would be channeled to relevant agencies for further action.

Minister Datuk Seri Salahuddin Ayub, said his ministry would take immediate action once it received a complaint through the application and resolve it within 14 days.

"Once we get a complaint, within a minute I will send it to my officer to investigate and take action. We have a set of standards that we need to follow.

"As a minister, I'm willing to engage with the operators. Come to me, come to us (the ministry)," he said to the New Straits Times in a sit-down interview.

Last year, the ministry resolved 96.21 per cent from the 29,265 complaints.

The remaining 1,109 complaints are still being investigated as of Dec 31.

Through Ez Adu, the ministry investigated 65.68 per cent of the total number of complaints while

the other 16.24 per cent were not within its jurisdiction.

Online transactions had the highest number of complaints at 8,847 with 5,290 of them involved consumers who did not receive the items that they had bought and 2,087 complaints were on misleading advertisements.

Other subcategories include misleading prices of goods or services (581 complaints), online counterfeit goods (229 complaints), non-disclosure (98 complaints).

The ministry also received other complaints including on the price of goods and service, misleading advertisements, controlled items and fake goods.

The ministry logged 5,510 complaints from male users and 13,755 complaints from female users.

Most of the complainants are those aged between 31 and 40 years old (11,037), while the least complaints were from teenagers aged less than 20 years old (891).

The state with the most number of complaints last year was Selangor with 8,374 complaints followed by Kuala Lumpur, which logged 6,982 complaints, and Johor, which had 2,308 complaints.

The top two types of complaints in these three states were on online transactions and misleading services.

In 2021, the Ez Adu was downloaded close to 50,000 times and the platform had 22,589 active users.

https://www.nst.com.my/news/nation/2023/02/876762/salahuddin-consumers-can-complain-direct-ministry-ez-adu-app