Singapore has ordered Meta Platforms to roll out stronger safeguards—including facial recognition checks—on Facebook by the end of this month to curb a surge in impersonation scams, warning of fines that could reach S$1 million ($776,639) for non-compliance.
The Ministry of Home Affairs said the directive, issued Wednesday under the Online Criminal Harms Act, gives Meta until September 30 to act. If the deadline is missed “without reasonable excuse,” the company faces additional penalties of up to S$100,000 for each day of delay.
A Meta spokesperson said the company prohibits impersonation and deceptive advertising on its platforms. “It’s against our policies to impersonate or run ads that deceptively use public figures to try to scam people, and we remove these when detected,” the company said, adding that it uses “specialised systems to detect impersonating accounts and celeb-bait ads” and is pursuing legal action with law enforcement against offenders.
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Earlier this month, police directed Meta to introduce anti-scam measures targeting fake ads and accounts impersonating senior government officials. That order came without a deadline. Authorities say the new directive became necessary after cases surged between June 2024 and June this year, with fraudsters using doctored images and videos of office holders in bogus promotions, profiles, and business pages.
While Meta has taken steps to curb scams globally, officials said they remain alarmed by the prevalence of such fraud in Singapore. “The Ministry of Home Affairs and the Singapore Police Force remain concerned by the prevalence of such scams,” the ministry noted.
The enforcement action marks the first directive under Singapore’s Online Criminal Harms Act, which took effect in February 2024—signaling the city-state’s willingness to leverage new legal powers to hold tech firms accountable for online fraud.