The Singapore Police Force says that it has detected an increase in the impersonation of agency names and the “gov.sg” SMS sender ID on major messaging platforms.
Singapore’s government has ordered the U.S. tech giants Apple and Google to take steps to prevent the spoofing of government agencies on their messaging platforms, the city-state’s latest effort to protect the public from impersonation scams.
In a statement on Tuesday, Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry said that the Implementation Directives are aimed at preventing the spoofing of government agency names and the “gov.sg” SMS sender ID by malicious actors.
The order came after the police observed impersonation scams, including more than 120 involving messages purporting to be from the local postal service SingPost. “There is therefore a need to put in place measures to deter the abuse of iMessage and Google Messages by scammers,” the Ministry stated.
Under the Implementation Directives, Apple and Google have been ordered to prevent accounts and group chats “from displaying names which spoof ‘gov.sg’ or Singapore Government agencies,” and to “filter messages from accounts and group chats” doing the same, the Ministry said. They must also “ensure the profile names of unknown senders are not displayed or are displayed less prominently than their phone numbers, in order to “help users better identify and be wary of unknown senders.”
The two companies will have until November 30 to comply, after which they will face potential financial penalties, although the Ministry said that both “have indicated that they will comply with the Implementation Directives.”
The directives were authorized under the Online Criminal Harms Act (OCHA), which was passed in June 2023 and came into force early the following year. According to the Singapore Police Force, OCHA “enables the authorities to deal more effectively with online activities that are criminal in nature.”
Chief among these has been a spike in various kinds of online scams since the OCHA came into effect. In the first half of 2025, Singapore reported 19,665 cases of scams, losses from which amounted to S$456.4 million ($353 million). An additional S$187.1 million ($143 million) was then lost to scams between July and September. The second-highest source of losses in the first half of the year was from impersonation scams, in which criminals pose online as reputable entities, including senior government officials, in order to lure in potential victims. The incidence of these sorts of scams more than tripled from 589 in the first half of 2024 to 1,762 over the same period in 2025.
In September, the Home Affairs Ministry ordered the U.S. tech giant Meta to put in place security measures to prevent Facebook impersonation scams, noting “an increased incidence of scammers exploiting Facebook to perpetrate impersonation scams using videos or images of key Government Office Holders in fake advertisements, accounts, profiles, and business pages.”
This is just the latest in a string of initiatives that the Singaporean authorities have introduced in order to combat scams. In January, it passed legislation allowing the police to take control of the bank accounts of individuals whom they suspect to be scam targets and limit the transactions they can authorize. Earlier this month, it also passed a law allowing for the mandatory caning of those found guilty of scamming offenses.