The Pulse
Meta and Singapore Police Target 3.7 Million Scam Assets
Meta says information shared by the Singapore Police Force helped it take action against more than 3.7 million scam-linked accounts, pages and other assets in 2026. The effort included 3.6 million dormant shell pages removed before scammers
AI.info Team ·
Meta says a two-year information-sharing partnership with the Singapore Police Force helped it take action against more than 3.7 million scam-linked accounts, pages and other assets on Facebook and Instagram in 2026.
The company disclosed the results on September 22, 2026, describing a shift from responding to individual reports toward identifying connected scam networks. The largest operation focused on “shell pages”—accounts that appeared empty or harmless but had been prepared for later use in fraudulent campaigns.
Meta said it removed more than 3.6 million of those pages in July, before they carried advertisements or other violating content. The Singapore Police Force said the broader partnership led to action against nearly 3.8 million scam-linked entities, pages and accounts this year.
Singapore Police Signals Led to Wider Network Takedowns
Between January and June, information from the Singapore Police Force led Meta to take action against more than 113,000 entities and pages connected to fraud and scams. Meta said the material involved mainly investment scams, in which operators promise guaranteed or unusually high returns.
The company said it acted against more than five times the number of assets directly flagged by Singapore police. Meta described the process as tracing links between accounts and pages rather than removing each asset in isolation, allowing investigators to identify related parts of the same operation.
Singapore police referred more than 20,000 Meta accounts, pages and pieces of content to the company during the first half of the year, according to the Singapore Police Force. The referrals included impersonation scams using social-media influencers, fake investment offers, concert-ticket schemes and online listings for goods priced well below normal market levels.
33,600 E-Commerce Entities Targeted Before School Holidays
Meta and Singapore police ran a separate disruption operation in June ahead of the country’s school holidays, when officials expected a seasonal increase in scam activity. The operation targeted e-commerce fraud involving misleading prices, fake promotions for well-known brands, exaggerated product claims and urgent calls to buy.
Meta said the June operation led to action against more than 33,600 entities. The figure covers accounts, pages and related assets connected to the e-commerce scams, rather than confirmed victims or financial losses.
Shell pages represented a different problem. They contained no obvious advertisements or harmful posts, but investigators found that scammers had created them as ready-made infrastructure for future campaigns. Removing those pages before activation allowed Meta to target preparation activity instead of waiting for a campaign to reach users.
Meta Says the Partnership Changes the Point of Intervention
Daryl Poon, Meta’s director of law enforcement outreach for the Asia-Pacific region, said the partnership gives investigators information they would not see from platform data alone.
“Scammers count on the fact that no single organisation sees the full picture. What we’ve built with the Singapore Police Force turns that assumption on its head — their information helps us identify threats we might not see on our own, and our ability to act at scale means those networks can be dismantled before they reach more people.”
Daryl Poon, director of law enforcement outreach, APAC, Meta
Senior Assistant Commissioner of Police Justin Wong, commander of the Singapore Police Force’s Cyber Command, said the operation showed how police and private companies can exchange signals to disrupt criminal infrastructure. He said the force plans to expand data sharing with Meta and other online service providers.
The arrangement also works in the other direction. Meta said information from its investigations helped the Singapore Police Force arrest seven men in 2025 over suspected involvement in a transnational unlawful remote betting operation.
The Campaign Sits Inside a Wider Anti-Scam Program
Meta said the Singapore work forms part of broader cooperation involving law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, telecommunications companies and technology providers. In May and June, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Scam Center Strike Force coordinated action involving Meta, Microsoft, Coinbase, Starlink and law enforcement partners from several countries.
That operation disrupted more than a million online assets, including 1.4 million Facebook and Instagram accounts, pages and groups, according to Meta. The Royal Thai Police also arrested 63 people involved in scam operations.
Meta, the Singapore Police Force and Singapore’s National Crime Prevention Council are running a public-education campaign called “One Step Ahead.” The campaign encourages users to activate two-factor authentication and passkeys on Facebook and Instagram, and to turn on Linked Device Notifications in WhatsApp. Meta said the campaign had reached 1.6 million people in Singapore.
Meta also said it had removed 65 million scam advertisements from Facebook and Instagram so far in 2026, with 94% removed before users reported them. The Singapore operation adds a different layer: removing infrastructure that may not yet have produced a visible scam, but is connected to networks preparing one.