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CNA also identified four online personas claiming to be employees of, or affiliated with, Infoassa. None had an independent online presence outside of Infoassa literature and self-reported LinkedIn profiles.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One persona named James Scoot was flagged by Dr Hayton for claiming, in a now-deactivated LinkedIn profile, to have worked for the government affairs consulting firm Vriens & Partners and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies think-tank. Checks with both organisations confirmed that no such individual had ever been employed there.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Deepfake testing of the profile picture attached to Scoot\u2019s page, along with that of the only other Infoassa persona with a profile picture, further flagged them as likely to be fake or <\/span>AI-generated<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n Experts told CNA that the apparent unsophistication of such efforts is rarely of concern to the operators behind them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a low-cost, set-and-forget kind of system that is easily discardable,\u201d said Associate Professor Dylan Loh from Nanyang Technological University\u2019s (NTU) Public Policy and Global Affairs programme, who added that AI has made it easier to create such front organisations en masse. \u201cThere are certainly more sophisticated ways of intelligence-gathering, but those require more resources and manpower.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Some of these operations are also carried out by for-profit intermediaries on behalf of state actors, said Assoc Prof Loh, and these contractors \u201csometimes do not put as much care and attention into the endeavour as one might expect\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIn any case, they can afford to be amateurish, so to speak, because you don\u2019t need an 80 or 90 per cent recruitment rate. You just need one or two good sources that could prove quite consequential.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Infoassa\u2019s job advertisements, which it has been posting since as early as January, reflect a clear target profile: Individuals with former government, military, parliamentary or think-tank experience, and often with expertise in international relations or security studies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n CNA found multiple such advertisements on various job boards. These included the US-based Workable and the Taiwanese platform Cake.me, as well as in online communities such as Effective Altruism and Jobs That Are Left, which cater to candidates seeking opportunities in politically progressive organisations.<\/span><\/p>\n The posts mostly sought applicants for remote, part-time roles like the one Maria applied for, and for a pay of between US$1,500 to US$4,000 per month. In her case, although she had already decided not to move forward with her application, Infoassa sent her a recruitment offer anyway, which included a writing test. In the test brief, seen by CNA, Maria was asked to complete a 1,500 word report primarily pertaining to US considerations ahead of an upcoming Trump-Xi summit in September.<\/span><\/p>\n She told CNA the brief unsettled her further. In addition to stilted English and awkward formatting, it asked her to \u201ctry to avoid using open-source information\u201d and to \u201cindicate the source of the information\u201d provided. She did not get back to Infoassa.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n CNA also identified four online personas claiming to be employees of, or affiliated with, Infoassa. None had an independent online presence outside of Infoassa literature…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":75336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/dam.mediacorp.sg\/image\/upload\/s--KQ89svhm--\/c_fill,g_auto,h_676,w_1200\/f_auto,q_auto\/v1\/mediacorp\/cna\/image\/2026\/08\/07\/screenshot_2026-08-05_at_16.18.35.png?itok=Ee4Ac0O8","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[7303,2538,1608,3751,10057,18713,27946,1215,4603,6766],"class_list":["post-75335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-news-sg-global","tag-employees","tag-fake","tag-firm","tag-foreign","tag-intelligence","tag-methods","tag-mirroring","tag-playbook","tag-recruitment","tag-singaporeregistered","wpcat-2-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/75336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}HIGH-VALUE TARGETS<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
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