The Ministry of Public Security is one of the main departments in China responsible for covertly manipulating global public opinion on social media.
China’s cyber interference and transnational crime groups in Southeast Asia
By expanding its influence operations by buying real social media accounts, renting or buying fake accounts from criminal networks, it encourages the development of other criminal activities such as illegal gambling, human trafficking and telecommunications crimes.
To investigate how the CCP creates or acquires fake accounts for use in its influence operations, including those currently targeting Australia, ASPI traced some of them to a network of Twitter accounts advertising links to Warner International Casino (华纳国际赌场), an illegal online gambling platform operating outside of Southeast Asia and linked to Chinese transnational criminals. organizations.
ASPI’s first report on coordinated information operations linked to the Chinese government, released in 2019, revealed that the campaign against the Hong Kong protests used repurposed spam or marketing accounts that were used by CCP operators to feed their covert networks. These personas tend to be flimsy but cheap, mass-produced, and quickly adapted to avoid automatic spam detection systems. This is partly why Chinese government agencies are hindering the latest efforts by social media platforms to counter influence ops and other coordinated misbehavior.
In the recent campaigns targeting the Australian political discourse discussed in the first part of this report, many accounts impersonating and targeting ASPI use pictures of the Bored Ape Yacht Club as profiles. These profiles are popular in many NFT (non-fungible token) spam networks, but they are also used by several accounts that link to Warner International
China is heavily outsourcing between China’s security services, which need to maintain their global information operations, and those groups that use fake accounts to promote criminal networks like Warner International. While not exactly the same, there are similarities in what US news outlet ProPublica found in 2020 regarding Beijing-based internet marketing company OneSight Beijing Technology, which was revealed to have ties to the Chinese government and was involved in covert social media influencer operations. ProPublica’s inspection of an interconnected group of accounts associated with OneSight Beijing Technology found that some of them were impersonating US government-funded broadcaster Radio Free Asia. We have seen the same tactics in a recent campaign targeting ASPI, Safeguard Defenders, Badiucao, Vicky Xu and others.
