Meta and Singapore police remove 3.7 million scam accounts and pages

According to Meta Platforms, a two-year information-sharing partnership with the Singapore Police Force has led to action against 3.7 million accounts, pages and pieces of content connected to scams on Facebook and Instagram.

The partnership works differently from how most platforms handle scam reports. Instead of waiting for individual users to flag suspicious accounts, the Singapore Police Force feeds intelligence directly to Meta's investigators, who use it to trace entire networks rather than single accounts.

What the numbers show

Between January and June 2026, information from the Singapore Police Force led Meta to take action against more than 113,000 entities and pages tied to fraud and scams, most of it investment scams promising guaranteed or high returns. Meta says that figure is more than five times the number of assets the police force actually flagged. One tip from law enforcement, followed through a network, produced action at more than five times that scale.

That gap is the point of the partnership. A single flagged account becomes a thread investigators pull, leading to other accounts, pages and infrastructure connected to the same operation. Disabling one node exposes the next.

Catching scams before they launch

In June 2026, anticipating a seasonal rise in scams around school holidays, Meta and the police force ran a targeted operation against e-commerce scams using misleading pricing, fake promotions for known brands and manufactured urgency. That operation led to action against more than 33,600 entities.

The most significant find came in July 2026. Police intelligence flagged a new tactic: "shell pages", pages built to look empty and harmless, with no ads or violating content visible. These pages were pre-built infrastructure, sitting dormant until scammers activated them for a campaign. Meta took action against over 3.6 million of these shell pages before they were used.

That number is the core of the outcome. Most enforcement against scams happens after a person has already been targeted, after money has moved. Removing shell pages before activation is action taken against infrastructure that had not yet reached anyone. It shifts the point of intervention from cleanup to prevention, at a scale that dwarfs the reactive numbers from earlier in the year.

Meta says it is now pursuing further disruptions against this shell-page tactic, treating it as an ongoing category rather than a single sweep.

The partnership has produced results before. Meta's information also aided the Singapore Police Force in the 2025 arrest of seven men suspected of running a transnational unlawful remote betting operation. The current numbers extend that same model of shared intelligence into a much larger volume of scam infrastructure.

For anyone using Facebook or Instagram in Singapore, this means a portion of the investment scam pages and e-commerce scam pages circulating this year were removed before most users ever saw them, including millions built and never activated.