Singapore's police do not measure what happens to suspected scam victims after officers step in, and they do not check whether scam networks knocked off social media come back under new accounts. Both points were set out on 7 October 2026 in written replies to Parliament from Mr K Shanmugam, Senior Minister, Coordinating Minister for National Security and Minister for Home Affairs, published by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).
A third reply, on the Singapore Police Force (SPF) partnership with Meta, said the police had not directly received any appeals arising from that collaboration. Taken together, the three answers show that the police are not tracking what happens after these interventions and takedowns.
What happens after the police intervene
In a parliamentary question, Mr Gabriel Lam asked whether the police follow up on people they proactively reach as suspected scam victims. His question set out three possible measures: the share who stop sending money once contacted, the share who later resume transfers to the same suspected scam network, and the share who fall victim to a different scam within 12 months.
The answer ran to a single sentence.
"The Police do not track such statistics," said K Shanmugam of the Ministry of Home Affairs.
That leaves no public figure for how often an intervention actually stops the loss, or for how many people are targeted again within a year. Gabriel's question was framed around exactly those outcomes, which is why the reply is notable. An intervention count can rise every year without showing whether the people contacted kept their money.
Do disrupted scam networks come back?
In a second question, Gabriel turned to 12 scam networks that had been broken up by taking down their social media presence, and asked whether police follow up on any that resurface under fresh profiles. He further asked whether such comeback rates are used to gauge how effective platform takedowns are.
The police do not track reappearance through new accounts, pages or advertisements, the Minister replied. He gave a reason: proving a link between a fresh account and an earlier network is hard.
"There are significant challenges to establish conclusively that newly created accounts, pages or advertisements are operated by the same scam network that was previously disrupted," said K Shanmugam of the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The reply did not address the second limb of the question directly, namely whether recurrence rates feed into any assessment of platform disruption.
No direct appeals from the Meta takedowns
The third reply responded to Mr Alex Yeo, who asked about the SPF and Meta collaboration against scam-linked entities, pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram. Alex wanted to know whether SPF or Meta had received appeals against the removals and, if so, how many entities, accounts or pages had been restored.
"The Police did not directly receive any appeals arising from this collaboration with Meta," said K Shanmugam of the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The answer covers appeals made directly to the police. It gives no figure for appeals lodged with Meta itself, and no restoration numbers.
The scale of that collaboration is set out in an SPF news release dated 22 September 2026. By the police's count, Meta acted on nearly 3.8 million scam-linked assets across Facebook and Instagram this year on the back of the information exchange. SPF flagged upwards of 20,000 items on Meta's services in the first half of 2026, and Meta went on to take down or restrict over 113,000 fraud-linked entities and pages over those six months. A June school-holiday push dealt with more than 33,600 entities, and a July exercise cleared out more than 3.64 million dormant shell pages before they could be put to use.
The release closed with a commitment from the head of SPF's Cyber Command to widen the approach.
"SPF will work with Meta and other online service providers to expand data sharing and strengthen scam disruption efforts," said Senior Assistant Commissioner of Police Justin Wong, Commander Cyber Command, of the Singapore Police Force.
Why the gap matters for compliance teams
Our coverage has followed Singapore's widening anti-scam enforcement, from the new Scams Bill to police disruption of iMessage scam accounts and islandwide operations against scammers and money mules. The figures SPF has published on its Meta partnership count referrals and removals. The 7 October replies confirm that outcomes for victims, and whether disrupted networks return, are not tracked by the police.
For banks, payment firms and platforms running their own scam controls, that has practical consequences:
- Do not wait for a public baseline: no police figure exists for how often an intervention halts transfers, so firms that warn or stop customers need their own measure of whether the customer later resumes payments to the same beneficiary.
- Watch for repeat victims: a customer who has been through one scam intervention is a candidate for closer monitoring, since no police re-victimisation rate tells firms how large that risk is.
- Treat takedowns as temporary: the Minister's point about attribution cuts both ways. If even the police cannot conclusively tie new accounts to an old network, fraud teams should not assume a removed network is gone, and should keep payee, device and behavioural indicators from earlier cases live in their screening.
- Keep records that can be audited: where firms remove or restrict accounts on scam grounds, a documented review route and restoration log helps answer the kind of question Alex put to the Minister.
The three answers are short, but they mark where police measurement of scam disruption currently stops. With SPF committed to expanding data sharing with Meta and other online service providers, the open question is whether outcome measures will follow the volume figures. Until they do, firms on the front line of scam losses will need to track for themselves whether their interventions and removals actually hold.
Read the full written replies from the Ministry of Home Affairs on post-intervention outcomes, scam network reappearance and appeals over removed accounts.
