Authorities to assess Meta’s compliance with directive to curb govt official impersonation scams: MHA
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Facebook parent Meta is required to implement measures to target scam advertisements, accounts, profiles and business pages impersonating key government office-holders on the social media platform.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Follow topic:
SINGAPORE – The authorities are reviewing Meta’s efforts to tackle government official impersonation scams, said the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on Nov 1.
In response to queries from The Straits Times, MHA added that it submitted documentation to the Online Criminal Harms Act (OCHA) Competent Authority on Oct 31.
The authority will “review the documentation and assess Meta’s compliance” with an implementation directive, it said.
Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook, was issued the directive under OCHA by the police on Sept 24
Under the directive, it was required to implement measures to target scam advertisements, accounts, profiles and business pages impersonating key government office-holders on the social media platform.
Failure to comply with the directive by Sept 30 would result in a fine of up to $1 million.
On top of this, there is a $100,000 daily fine in the case of a continuing offence.
This was the first time such an order was issued by the police to an online platform to tackle scams.
The directive was issued due to the increasing number of scammers exploiting Facebook to run impersonation scams using videos or images of key government office-holders in fake advertisements, accounts, profiles and business pages, said MHA in September.
It added that Facebook was the top platform used by scammers to commit such scams.
Although it acknowledged that Meta had taken some steps to address the risk of impersonation scams globally, the authorities remained concerned about the prevalence of such scams in Singapore.
MHA said in September that the authorities were considering imposing similar requirements on other online platforms, with more details to be announced later.
In the first six months of 2025, victims lost $126.5 million to scams, nearly double the $67.2 million lost in the first half of 2024.
Police mid-year statistics showed that government official impersonation scams have almost tripled,
