Popular social networking site Facebook has become a tool for trans-border syndicates to recruit fresh drug mules from Malaysia.

Malaysian Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Richard Riot Jaem said here on Thursday that more varsity-age Malaysian girls using Facebook were being lured by drug syndicates' promises of significant rewards to ferry drugs for them.

The Star, a local media, quoted Jaem as saying that about 70 Malaysian women have been sentenced to death for drug trafficking in several countries since two decades ago.

The ministry also found that most of the victims were befriended by syndicate members of African origin.

Jaem explained that syndicates, after befriending their victims, would offer to pay for "holidays" overseas and offer them thousands of ringgit (one U.S. dollar=3.15 ringgit) in pocket money to spend on the trips.

A global survey by TNS, an international research company, showed last month that Malaysians had most friends on social networking sites and spent the most hours a week on such sites, raising concerns in the country.

RTM, the Malaysian government-owned television, has aired a weekly program raising awareness among the young people.

Jaem urged the group of 20 journalists from the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Uzbekistan and Mongolia under a Malaysian Press Institute's program to educate Asians being victimized by international drug syndicates.

He said 785 of 1,560 Malaysians arrested overseas since 1991 were drug mules, and 149 of them were women.

The latest case was a 22-year-old female student in the final semester at a polytechnic in Malaysia who was arrested with 1.4 kilograms of narcotics in China last month.