Meta acts against 3.7 million scammers' accounts with Singapore police help

SINGAPORE: Meta has disrupted more than 3.7 million scam-linked accounts, pages and other content this year based on information provided by the Singapore police, the company said Wednesday.

The social media giant said the Singapore Police Force (SPF) has been helping Meta's investigators "identify and dismantle entire ecosystems of scammers" through an information-sharing collaboration in place over the past two years.

Between January and June, Meta removed more than 113, 000 entities and pages related to fraud and scams on Facebook and Instagram, company executives said at a media briefing.

In June, Meta said it disrupted more than 33,600 entities and pages linked to scammers who were trying to take advantage the upcoming school holidays when families are rushing to look at travel websites for good deals.

And in July, Meta took action against more than 3.6 million entities and pages, the big majority of which were "shell pages", or those that have no content and are not in active use, but could still be acquired by scammers for their future activities.

Meta did not provide comparative figures.

As scammers operate across different platforms and in varying countries, Meta alone does not have a full view of the problem.

"Scammers count on the fact that no single organisation sees the full picture. What we have built with the Singapore Police Force changes that," said Daryl Poon, director of law enforcement outreach for the Asia Pacific at Meta.

Information given by the police "helps us identify the threats we might not see on our own," he said.

"Our ability to act at scale means these networks can be dismantled before they reach more people," he said.

The collaboration with SPF is a "model which we want to keep building on here and across the region," he added.

Clara Koh, director of public policy for Southeast Asia, said scammers are now operating at an industrial scale and are using artificial intelligence "to mass produce fake profiles", fabricate imagery and generate offensive malicious code.

Meta "is continuing to invest in building the defenses across our platforms and getting to violating scam content quickly, especially before anyone sees them", she said.