Collaborating with the firm that runs the two social media platforms involved, the authorities expect to take down scam infrastructure preemptively

At a 22 September 2026 press briefing, Meta announced that it had removed more than 3.64m dormant “shell pages” on Facebook and Instagram in July 2026 after the Singapore Police Force (SPF) had flagged the web materials as pre-built infrastructure for future scam campaigns.

Although the pages did not at the time contain posts, and looked innocuous, the firm explained that scammers create such shell pages to “age” quietly to avoid security triggers applied to brand-new accounts. However, once activated, such pages can be coordinated to manufacture an illusion of legitimacy before cybercriminals launch fraud operations.

The takedown was part of a wider Meta–SPF collaboration that has disrupted more than 3.7m scam-linked accounts, pages and other content in 2026 so far. A separate operation in June 2026 had targeted more than 33,600 entities linked to e-commerce fraud ahead of Singapore’s school holidays.

Additionally, the firm mentioned that, for every entity flagged by police, it had identified and removed four additional related assets. Meta also reported removing 65m scam advertisements on Facebook and Instagram so far this year, detecting 94% before users reported them.

Scams at industrial scale

According to official statistics, scams remain a persistent problem in Singapore, with 16,821 cases reported in the first half of 2026 and victims losing more than S$410m.

Back in February 2024, the SPF had observed that Meta’s social media platforms had hosted a majority of fraud attempts, with the Ministry of Home Affairs announcing its “deep concern” that the named platforms had “persistently been the most common platforms used by scammers.

By July 2026, the SPF’s new Cyber Command had been established, tasked with targeting scam infrastructure before it reaches victims. Its commander, Senior Assistant Commissioner Justin Wong, has called the recent operation a demonstration of what police and private-sector collaboration can achieve: “Scam infrastructure was decisively taken down, cutting off scammers’ ability to defraud Singaporeans.”