SINGAPORE - By the end of June, all Facebook advertisers will need to verify their identities by uploading their Government-issued ID.
Mandatory verification for all advertisers comes on the heels of a 12 per cent increase in reports about scam advertisements on Facebook from June to December 2024.
During that period, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had allowed Facebook to only apply the verification requirement on selected advertisers. If scams remain rampant, MHA would tighten its requirements.
Under a new Code of Practice for E-Commerce Services, which took effect in June 2024, designated platforms such as Facebook and Carousell need to roll out measures to protect Singapore users from scams.
Between June and December 2024, they needed to verify only the identities of sellers considered “risky”.
On March 10, MHA said Facebook was unable to curb the frequency of scam advertisements in the second half of 2024. The authority noted that Meta’s verification requirements were restricted to paid advertisements while the police’s statistics on scam advertisements comprise both paid and unpaid posts.
MHA said: “Meta intends to verify the identities of all advertisers on Facebook by end-June 2025. We welcome this and will monitor the situation.”
Failure to comply with the Code is a criminal offence under the Online Criminal Harms Act (Ocha). Guilty parties may be fined of up to $1 million under Ocha, which came into effect in Feb 2024.
The pilot also involved Carousell and Facebook’s Marketplace and Pages services, giving time for both platforms to trial the use of verification measures on selected sellers and advertisers.
Both platforms ranked at the bottom of a yearly e-commerce safety ranking by MHA published in April 2024.
On March 10, MHA said it was satisfied with the effectiveness of anti-scam measures to screen selected users on Meta and Carousell’s online marketplaces and has decided not to require compulsory verification measures for all sellers.
The number of e-commerce scams on Facebook Marketplace fell by around 55 per cent from June to December 2024, which MHA said is a “significant improvement.”
“That said,” said MHA, “we will continue to monitor the e-commerce scams situation on Marketplace, and may require Meta to verify the identities of more sellers should the situation worsen.”
Meta’s director of Public Policy in South East Asia Rafael Frankel said that similar user verification measures may be rolled out in other markets depending on the effectiveness of the measures in the pilot in Singapore. He declined to reveal how Facebook identifies risky accounts for fear that scammers would use the information to evade detection.
Carousell was also let off being required to verify all its sellers, owing to a 11 per cent drop in e-commerce scams on the platform.
“While this was not a significant decrease, it was a decreasing trend, and Carousell has demonstrated willingness and proactiveness to work with us on various anti-scam measures,” said MHA.
The platform requires sellers making transactions in high-risk categories like property to verify their identities using Singpass. Carousell may also screen users that are considered risky, such as sellers using new accounts with low profile ratings and a large volume of chats and others with items listed with prices too good to be true.
Carousell will be given another six months to curb the frequency of e-commerce scams reported, or be required to verify the identities of all its sellers by October, said MHA.
A breakdown of e-commerce scams reported by online platforms compiled by MHA shows that Facebook accounted for 37.4 per cent (or 4,368 cases) of e-commerce scams in 2024.
Carousell came in second with 1,987 reported scams, accounting for 17 per cent of all e-commerce cases.
E-commerce scams were the most common type of scams in 2024, with 11,665 reported cases and victims losing at least $17.5 million in total. This is an increase from the 9,783 e-commerce scam cases reported in 2023, involving $13.9 million lost in total.
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