Two ads on Facebook try to pass off as posts by The Straits Times

Two fake advertisements that try to pass off as Facebook posts by The Straits Times have surfaced on the social media platform.

When a user clicks on the advertisements, he is directed to genuine ST articles which seem related to the advertisements at first glance. But the ST stories are actually not related to the text and images used in the fake advertisements.

In response to queries from The Straits Times, a spokesman for Facebook said the company took a serious view of such content."It is important to us that ads on Facebook are useful to people and not used for promoting deceptive or scam-related behavior," she said.

Facebook said it had removed the advertisements and disabled the associated pages and accounts.

"While we have long had systems in place to remove ads that violate our policies from Facebook, we continue to increase our efforts and investments to get at this problem. We encourage people to report this kind of behavior if they see it by tapping the three dots in the top right corner of the ad," the spokesman added.

One of the advertisements shows a photo of actress Zoe Tay and an image of someone holding what looks like a microchip.

The fake ST Facebook blurb says: "She opens up about a smart backdoor that helped her to recover from the past failures." The headline reads: "She Know It Will Make Noise But She Can't Keep Quiet Anymore."

The fake advertisement leads to an ST article in which Tay talks about coaching her second son Ashton for the Primary School Leaving Examination. The photo used in the article is different from the image used in the Facebook post.

The second fake ST Facebook blurb uses a doctored picture of Singapore singer Stefanie Sun and links to an ST article in which Sun talks about encouraging her son after he had lost a competition.