Meta and Singapore police take apart a scam machine

Meta says two years of information sharing with the Singapore Police Force has become one of its most productive anti-scam pipelines, with more than 3.7 million accounts, pages and pieces of content actioned on Facebook and Instagram in total.

What the partnership produced

Between January and June 2026, information handed over by the force led Meta to act on more than 113,000 entities and pages connected to fraud and scams, most of them investment scams promising guaranteed or unusually high returns. Meta says the police tip-offs produced action on more than five times the number of items it would have flagged on its own, which is the clearest evidence yet that the value of the arrangement is not the individual reports but the networks they expose.

A second push in June 2026, timed for the school holidays, went after e-commerce scams: fake discounts on well-known brands, exaggerated product claims and manufactured scarcity. That operation resulted in action against more than 33,600 entities.

The dormant pages were the real find

The most interesting result is not a takedown at all. In July 2026 Meta acted on more than 3.6 million so-called shell pages, accounts that looked empty and harmless because they were empty and harmless, created with no advertisements and no violating content, waiting to be switched on for a campaign at a moment's notice. Removing them in advance is the difference between clearing up after a flood and shutting the tap.

The flow of information runs both ways. Meta says its own data helped the Singapore Police Force arrest seven men in 2025 over a transnational remote betting operation, which is the sort of result a platform cannot deliver alone: it can see the accounts, but not the syndicate behind them.

This sits inside a much larger operation

Meta places the Singapore work inside a wider push. Across two weeks in May and June 2026 the US Department of Justice's Scam Center Strike Force brought Meta, Microsoft, Coinbase and Starlink together with the FBI, the Secret Service and law enforcement from the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Thailand. That joint effort disrupted more than a million online items, including 1.4 million accounts, pages and groups across Facebook and Instagram, 20,000 Microsoft accounts and thousands of Starlink kits, and the Royal Thai Police arrested 63 people.

Daryl Poon, Meta's director of law enforcement outreach for Asia-Pacific, said the police force's information helps the company identify threats it would not see on its own. Senior Assistant Commissioner of Police Justin Wong, commander of the force's Cyber Command, said the recent operation showed scam infrastructure being taken down decisively and that the force will expand data sharing with Meta and other providers.

Our opinion

The shell pages are the number that should worry anyone who still thinks of a scam as a fake profile that someone reports. Three and a half million empty pages is not a crime wave, it is inventory, and it was built in advance of demand. That only works at industrial scale, and it only gets caught by a partner holding intelligence the platform cannot generate on its own.

It also explains why the useful anti-fraud work increasingly happens in the gap between companies and police forces rather than inside either. A platform can see the accounts and act at scale, but it cannot see who is paying for them or where the money lands; a police force can see the network and make arrests, but it cannot delete a page. Singapore is small enough, and its force centralised enough, for that gap to be closed by a conversation rather than a treaty, which is why the model shows up there before it shows up anywhere bigger. Whether it survives being copied into jurisdictions where the sharing is politically contested is the open question, and nobody has tested that yet.