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.
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