From April 10 to Friday last week, Meta Platforms Inc and Google Taiwan removed a combined 1,363 scam investment advertisements from their platforms, the Financial Supervisory Commission said yesterday, as it warned of the continuing prevalence of fraudulent information.
That compares with the 39 scam ads they deleted a month earlier, the commission said.
During the period, the commission detected 1,615 ads that were highly likely to be scams to Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, and Meta removed about 83 percent of them, or 1,338 ads, it said.
Photo: Tyrone Su, Reuters
The commission found 105 suspicious ads on Google during the same period, with Google deleting 25 ads, or 24 percent of the total, it said.
Even though Google has a lower cancelation ratio, the company is willing to cooperate with the commission in fighting fraud and conducts an internal examination before removing suspicious posts, the commission said.
The scam ads mostly feature fake endorsements by celebrities or executives of big financial companies as well as stock analyses, and invite platform visitors to join messaging groups, the commission said.
Cathay Financial Holding Co (國泰金控) chairman Tsai Hung-tu (蔡宏圖), Cathay Securities Investment Trust Co (國泰投信) chairman Jeff Chang (張錫), SinoPac Financial lead economist Jack Huang (黃蔭基) and CTBC Bank retail banking CEO Amy Yang (楊淑惠) have been featured in the fake ads, data showed.
Besides partnering with online platforms, the commission said it is to tighten the Securities Investment Trust and Consulting Act (證券投資信託及顧問法) to curb investment misinformation.
Advertisements must not entice people to invest or guarantee returns, use the name of celebrities and other people or organizations without their consent, while companies or individuals must use their real names when applying to post ads on online platforms, the commission said.
Online platforms would be held liable if advertisements are found to be fraudulent and lead to losses for consumers, it said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts