Singapore will order Meta to crack down on scammers pretending to be government officials, a type of fraud that has boomed in the city-state and cost victims tens of millions of dollars, authorities said Wednesday.

Meta's Facebook is the top platform fraudsters use to carry out the scams, said Minister of State for Home Affairs Goh Pei Ming, who warned of fines of up to Sg$1 million ($776,000) if the tech giant fails to act.

During the first half of this year, so-called government official impersonation scams rose by 200 percent from the year before to more than 1,760 cases, Goh said in a speech to an anti-scam conference.

In a notorious example, scammers used deepfakes or images of Prime Minister Lawrence Wong this year to sell fraudulent cryptocurrency investment schemes.

Losses to i

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