Fake Facebook advertisements claim that Temasek chief executive officer Ho Ching gave out money-making secrets during an interview for a “cryptocurrency trading programme”.
The scam article titled, ‘SPECIAL REPORT: Ho Ching Latest Investment has Experts in Awe and Big Banks Terrified’, even claimed that it was published in mainstream media sites such as The Straits Times and had the logos of other news portals such as TODAY, The New P5aper, Business Times,
In a Facebook post early Tuesday morning (Nov 26), the CEO of Temasek wrote that “that there have been some more fat frogs jumping in the streets”.
She explained that the scams masquerading as “breathless news from Straits Times, Channel News Asia, etc, have resurfaced and making the rounds again, using my name and making up fake breathtaking quotes from me and others”.
“These fake articles talk about fantastical ways of making money from bitcoins and such like, and pretend there are loopholes for multiplying your money quickly”, Ho Ching explained.
She also noted that these fake articles use older photos of her or newer photos that were superimposed in front of various banks.
Along with asking those who come across these scam articles to report them, she said, “More importantly, don’t get scammed or conned into investing into this or that get rich schemes”.
These fake articles linked to fake advertisements on Facebook have been circulating repeatedly despite attempts by the social media platform to remove them.
In response to media queries, a Facebook spokesperson said, “These scammers use sophisticated cloaking technology to mask content so that it shows different versions to our ad review systems than it does to people. This is a clear violation of our policies as ads must not use tactics intended to circumvent our ad review process or other enforcement systems. We have removed the ads and disabled the associated pages and ad accounts”.
“We encourage our community to report ads they believe are misleading as this information helps us improve our automated detection systems to counter cloaking tactics and make us better”, they added. /TISG