Singapore has seen a documented rise in scams that impersonate real executives and public figures — fabricated endorsement videos, cloned company pages, WhatsApp broadcasts using a founder's name and photo to solicit deposits into a fake scheme. The Singapore Police Force, MAS and the Cyber Security Agency have issued joint advisories on scams involving this kind of digital manipulation, including cases using AI-generated impersonation.
What's actually being used against you
- Name and photo, straightforwardly lifted. The lowest-effort version — a screenshot from a real interview or LinkedIn photo, attached to a fake trading platform.
- Deepfake video or voice. AI-generated footage of you "endorsing" a scheme, increasingly convincing and increasingly cheap to produce.
- Cloned company assets. A near-identical website or app using your branding, sometimes registered on a confusingly similar domain.
- Impersonated communication. Messages sent as if from you or your company, often through WhatsApp broadcasts or fake company email addresses.
The first 24 hours
Report to the platform immediately, using the impersonation-specific channel, not general content flagging. Meta, Google and most major platforms have expedited paths for impersonation and scam-ad reports that move faster than standard removal requests.
File a police report. This matters even without a personal financial loss — the impersonation itself is being used to defraud third parties, and a formal report creates a record platforms and banks take seriously.
Publish a clear, dated statement. A short notice on your own verified channels stating plainly that the scheme is not affiliated with you gives anyone who encounters the fake material something authoritative to check against.
Notify anyone who might plausibly be targeted. Existing clients, investors and employees are the most likely audience for a scam using your name specifically — a direct heads-up closes the loop faster than waiting for search visibility to catch up.
The regulatory backdrop moving in your favour
Singapore's Online Safety (Relief and Accountability) Bill, passed in late 2025, established an Online Safety Commission with powers to direct takedowns, restrict accounts used by perpetrators, and assist victims in identifying anonymous actors for civil enforcement. Combined with enhanced banking safeguards introduced from October 2025, the reporting infrastructure for this specific problem has genuinely improved — worth citing directly when pressing a platform or bank for faster action.
The goal in the first 24 hours isn't to win the legal case. It's to create a record and a correction fast enough that the scheme runs out of runway before it scales.
After the immediate response
Search visibility takes longer to resolve than the platform-level takedown. Once the immediate spread is contained, the same displacement and correction work covered in our guide to reputation repair applies — building and holding an accurate search presence so that anyone researching you later finds the correction, not the scam.