A scam rarely begins with a dramatic breach. More often, it starts with something ordinary: a Facebook page selling discounted skincare, an Instagram post promising easy investment gains, or a message from a group that claims to have found a way to beat the market.
By the time victims realise what has happened, the people behind these schemes may have already shifted accounts, changed names, moved chats to another app and started again elsewhere. That is what makes online scams so difficult to police. They are not isolated posts or rogue pages, but networks built to move quickly across platforms and borders.
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Meta now says a two-year information-sharing partnership with the Singapore Police Force (SPF) has helped it take action against more than 3.7 million scam-linked accounts, pages and pieces of content across Facebook and Instagram in 2026. The bulk of that figure came from dormant “shell pages” that were taken down before they could be activated.
The figures underline how Singapore has become both a target and a testbed for anti-scam enforcement in Southeast Asia. The city-state is highly connected, financially sophisticated and heavily reliant on digital payments, social platforms and messaging apps. Those same strengths have made it attractive to criminal syndicates looking for victims who are online, mobile-first and accustomed to transacting digitally.
From takedowns to network disruption
According to Meta, the partnership with SPF is designed to go beyond removing individual scam posts after users report them. Instead, Meta’s investigators use information from the police to map wider clusters of activity and identify related accounts, pages and assets.
Between January and June 2026, Meta took action against more than 113,000 entities and pages on Facebook and Instagram connected to fraud and scams, using information shared by SPF. Much of the content involved investment scams, in which victims are lured by promises of guaranteed or unusually high returns.
SPF referred more than 20,000 accounts, pages and pieces of content to Meta during that period. Meta said those signals led it to act against more than five times as many assets, suggesting that one suspicious account can lead investigators to many more linked to the same operation. That matters because scam groups build redundancy into their operations. If one page disappears, another is ready to replace it.
In June, ahead of the school holidays, Meta and SPF also ran an enhanced disruption exercise focused on e-commerce scams. These schemes relied on familiar tactics: misleading prices, fake promotions for well-known brands, exaggerated product claims and countdown-style pressure to make users act quickly. That operation led Meta to take action against more than 33,600 entities.
The largest number came in July, when SPF information helped identify a newer scam pattern: shell pages. These pages may appear empty and harmless, with no obvious scam content or ads. But they function as pre-built infrastructure, waiting to be repurposed for fraudulent campaigns. Meta said it acted against more than 3.6 million such pages before they could be used.
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Daryl Poon, Meta’s Director of Law Enforcement Outreach for APAC, said scammers rely on fragmented visibility across institutions. “Scammers count on the fact that no single organisation sees the full picture,” he said, adding that SPF’s information allows Meta to identify threats it might not see on its own.
Why Singapore is pushing public-private enforcement
Singapore’s urgency is not hard to understand. Scam losses in the country have risen sharply in recent years, with police figures showing victims lost more than US$800 million in 2024 alone. The problem is no longer confined to crude phishing links or impersonation calls. Scammers now use social engineering, fake investment communities, impersonated brands, mule accounts and encrypted messaging channels to build trust and extract money.
For authorities, that creates a structural problem. Police can investigate complaints and arrest suspects, but much of the early scam activity happens on private digital platforms. Platforms, meanwhile, can remove content and accounts, but may lack the external intelligence needed to connect what looks like scattered activity into a criminal network.
Senior Assistant Commissioner Justin Wong, Commander of SPF’s Cyber Command, framed the Meta partnership as part of a broader shift in enforcement. He said tackling sophisticated scam networks requires collaboration with international and private stakeholders, with shared scam signals helping platforms disrupt criminal infrastructure before victims are defrauded.
The Singapore model also reflects a wider regional challenge. Southeast Asia has seen the rise of industrial-scale scam operations, some linked to compounds operating across borders. Victims may be in Singapore, the platform may be American, the payment trail may pass through multiple jurisdictions, and the operators may be based elsewhere in the region. Traditional enforcement struggles when the crime scene is spread across apps, countries and financial rails.
Meta’s wider anti-scam push
The SPF partnership sits within Meta’s broader anti-scam efforts. The company said that, so far this year, it has removed 65 million scam ads from Facebook and Instagram, with 94 per cent taken down before users reported them.
Meta has also taken part in larger cross-border operations. Over two weeks in May and June 2026, the US Department of Justice’s Scam Center Strike Force brought together companies including Meta, Microsoft, Coinbase and Starlink, alongside law enforcement agencies from the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Thailand. The operation disrupted more than 1.4 million accounts, pages and groups across Facebook and Instagram, along with 20,000 Microsoft accounts and thousands of Starlink kits. Thai police also arrested 63 people linked to scam operations.
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In Singapore, Meta, SPF and the National Crime Prevention Council have also worked on public education through the “One Step Ahead” campaign. It encourages people to turn on security features such as two-factor authentication and passkeys for Facebook and Instagram, use WhatsApp linked-device notifications, and rely on local tools such as ScamShield. Meta said the campaign has reached 1.6 million people in Singapore.
Such education efforts are necessary, but they also expose the limits of relying on users to protect themselves. Many scams are designed to exploit moments of haste, trust or financial stress. Security prompts help, but organised scam networks require organised countermeasures.
Rivals face the same trust problem
Meta is not alone in facing this pressure. TikTok, Google-owned YouTube, X, Telegram, WhatsApp, online marketplaces and messaging platforms all sit somewhere along the scam economy’s path, whether as discovery channels, impersonation surfaces, payment touchpoints or migration routes. In Southeast Asia, where social commerce and chat-based selling are deeply embedded, the lines between content, commerce and messaging are often blurred.
That makes anti-scam work as much a competitive trust issue as a compliance obligation. Platforms that cannot control fraudulent activity risk losing user confidence, advertiser trust and regulatory goodwill. Governments in the region are also becoming more assertive, pushing platforms, banks and telcos to share signals faster and shoulder more responsibility for online harms.
Also Read: ASEAN Foundation, Google.org launch US$5M drive to combat scams across Southeast Asia
For Meta, the Singapore partnership offers a glimpse of what that future may look like: less reliance on one-off user reports, more intelligence-sharing, and faster action against infrastructure that has not yet gone live.
The challenge is scale. Scammers adapt quickly, and every successful disruption teaches them what to avoid next. But the latest figures make one thing clear: in the fight against online scams, waiting for victims to report the damage is no longer enough.
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