Blocked fake website Singapore Times linked to Chinese company, CNA investigation finds
The website is among six blocked by Singapore authorities over their potential to be used in hostile information campaigns.
Screenshots of singaporeheadline.com, singaporeweek.com, singapore24hour.com and nanyangweekly.com.
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SINGAPORE: The Singapore Times, which was one of six inauthentic websites blocked by Singapore authorities for posing as local mainstream news outlets, is linked to a Chinese company, an investigation by CNA has found.
The other fake websites are also likely a coordinated cluster, based on findings by CNA Verification.
The six websites were blocked by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) on Thursday (Apr 23) over their potential to be used in hostile information campaigns against Singapore.
CNA Verification also uncovered a Chinese-language companion to sgtimes.com. This website runs on a direct Alibaba Cloud IP address in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.
The site, cn.sgtimes.com, actively impersonates Lianhe Zaobao's search engine optimisation (SEO) – its meta keywords explicitly include Lianhe Zaobao’s name in Chinese characters – suggesting an attempt to hijack Singapore Chinese language news search traffic. It is understood that this website could be blocked as well.
LINKS TO CHINESE FIRM
A registration number displayed at the bottom of the sgtimes.com homepage was traced to a company named Jiangsu Nanfang Digital Technology. Chinese authorities issue Internet Content Provider (ICP) licences to permit China-based websites to operate in the country; the ICP filing linked from sgtimes.com lists the site under a registration number associated with the company.
Public company directories show Jiangsu Nanfang Digital Technology is a for-profit enterprise in Jiangsu province, founded on Feb 18, 2021. The ICP filing carries a "-15" suffix, indicating sgtimes.com is the 15th website operated by the company.
The company has a public corporate website where it presents itself as a global digital marketing and overseas brand-promotion company. It advertises services including multilingual website development, SEO, press release distribution and translation, among others.
Another site sharing the same ICP registration number is ibnews.com, which describes itself as a website for International Business News, “a company that provides global economic, business and technology news services”. This website carries more than 5,000 links to cn.sgtimes.com.
LIKELY COORDINATED CLUSTER
Apart from sgtimes.com, the other five are singaporeheadline.com, singaporeweek.com, singapore24hour.com, nanyangweekly.com and singaporebuzz.com.
These five sites were registered through Cloudflare within a 24-second window on Mar 28, 2021, CNA Verification found, strongly suggesting they were set up as a batch.
Across the five sites, the texts on their privacy policy and terms and conditions pages were also identical.
CNA Verification also found no signs of an English-language social media network promoting these seven fake websites and their content.
Searches across Facebook, X, Telegram, YouTube and Reddit did not surface any relevant or convincing findings. Accounts with exact or near-exact name matches were unrelated.
This does not rule out private, renamed or less obvious amplification channels. Nevertheless, it is consistent with previous research showing that such inauthentic, heavily syndicated news website operations are SEO-farming infrastructure targeting search and aggregator visibility, rather than social media virality.
