Malaysia VEP - A tale of complete incompetence

So as we may know, all drivers to Malaysia now require a Vehicle Entry Permit (“VEP”) to enter the country. The VEP I refer to here is an ugly tamper-proof RFID tag to be affixed on a vehicle. The Malaysian Transport Department (“JPJ”) has appointed a shithole of a company “TCSENS” to handle all VEP matters.

They offer 2 options for VEP collection: Self collect, where you have to drive across the causeway and have it installed, or by mail, where you pay an admittedly high sum(RM58.26 ~= SG$17-18) for the worst delivery experience. More on that later.

Here is my story of the sheer nightmare having to deal with the clown fest that is the holy trinity of JPJ, TCSENS, and City Link Express.

As of time of writing, it has been approximately 1 year and I still have not received my stupid VEP tag.

Before we start, let’s look at a poster from what I suspect is from their hiring campaign when looking for staff to fill the roles in this “supply chain”. This will give you a sense of better sense of what I have to deal with.

So anyway, the VEP application requests a some stuff(that to be honest is completely unneccessary), including:

• Insurance certificate(scans are not allowed apparently)
• COE document
• Details of your car down to the chassis number

After a month of trying to get my VEP approved, I finally got it and made the payment for them to deliver it on 25 Aug 2024.

In the email they said my tag would be delivered in 10 days. Note: Delivered, not Shipped out. Honestly, I can order stuff with $1.99 delivery fee from Shopee or Lazada and have that arrive cheaper and faster. But whatever, right?

1 month later, they finally decide to ship that damn thing. Great, it should not be long now right since Malaysia is our direct neighbour?

Guess not. Months went by and nothing ever came. I kept looking at the website tracker regularly, but it took too long and I eventually forgot about it.

Somewhere in early January I had a nagging feeling something was wrong. I looked and saw this:

Yo what the fuck? It supposedly came on 27 Novemner. But nothing ever came. Now I have a smart doorbell with motion detection recording. If a neighbour so much as walks across the corridor, I will be able to capture it.

I pulled all footage from that day, and guess what? Nobody came.

I went to their website and attempted to pull out a Proof of Delivery.

Surprise! The thing does not work. Every permutation I tried did not go through. Ok, so no proof of delivery here. Let’s contact them.

I wrote a polite email to City Link Express to ask about it. on 9 January 2025. After 2 weeks of “investigation” and me having to ask again for a result, they gave me this crap.

What? Did the proof of delivery not get uploaded to your shitty system somewhere? This raises red flags all over.

1. The contractor doesn’t have a proof of delivery, and somehow claims something was delivered. Mind you this is a Tracked Parcel. I don’t know about you, but tracked parcels require Proofs of Delivery, especially important items like an RFID tag. A picture is needed if you left it at the door(but this should not be allowed for such an important item in this case), or someone has to sign for it.
2. Why doesn’t City Link have the picture? If you’re paying an external contractor you should have verified that the job is done, no?
3. Again, if you have a system for Proof of Delivery, why was it not captured?
4. Even my online shopping for some cheapo item with free (or $1.99) delivery, I get a WhatsApp image sent to my phone when they drop it at my door. And City Link has the audacity to charge this much?

So I emailed TCSENS, trying to resolve the situation. This is their response.

What? I need the serial number of the tag that never came, to click this mythical “report issue”. Awesome. Clearly someone didn’t read the email.

Anyway, after some back and forth, they did an investigation and this came back:

Again, some incompetent people did not check for proof of delivery, which I raised with them and asked them to check. So now not only they want me to pay extra, they also want me to make an appointment to drive down to their office to do it.

So anyway, after more emails trying to reason with them, I realized that it’s probably more likely that I can have a meaningful conversation with a brick wall than trying to get them to use common sense and logic.

Let’s now ask someone else for help. I now turned to JPJ, the Malaysian transport department who has a dedicated email solely for VEP matters.

Initially it started of well:

But later on, every single email was met with this template response:

And interestingly enough, after almost 1 year into this ordeal, City Link seems to have reverted their tracking system to not show it as delivered.

I ended up following up again with Citi Link over a few weeks, not being overly annoyingly pushy, with at least 1 week in between for the to reply. Until I got more peeved.

Finally after the semi aggresive email I sent, This person who appears to be their manager replied. “5 months data storage”? Do you even read? I first reached out to you within a month or two from your so called delivery date about no delivery and you give me this crap now after pushing everything to your colleague.

Then this person finally took some semblance of responsibility for the missing VEP.

Then Yul then finally replied about this with a satisfactory response.

He confirmed my mailing address in another email, then proceeded to fucking ghost me again for another 2 months.

Well, if this ever gets resolved I’ll update this post about it.