Sina Weibo cracks down on fraud, fake accounts

Beijing, Oct 28 (IANS) China’s Twitter-like micro-blogging platform Sina Weibo has suspended around 37 accounts that were involved in fraud or were publishing misleading information, the media has reported.

Weibo took down the accounts that were found to be luring customers into purchasing illegal wealth management products and commit fraud.

Sina, owner of Weibo, said, according to the relevant laws and regulations it had suspended 37 accounts that published “misleading investment information” or were involved in “securities frauds”, South China Morning Post reported on Monday.

This comes amid the Chinese government’s move asking tech firms to do more to censor their content and ongoing crackdown on social media platforms.

In China, authorities are leaning on social media platforms, like Weibo and WeChat, to monitor posts by their users more rigorously.

Chinese popular social media platform WeChat said it had suspended 45,000 copycat official accounts between January and September, according to Xinhua news agency.