CHINA WATCHChina’s Cyber Interference and Transnational Crime Groups in Southeast Asia
The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of engagement with criminal organizations and proxies to achieve its strategic objectives. This activity involves the Chinese government’s spreading of influence and disinformation campaigns using fake personas and inauthentic accounts on social media that are linked to transnational criminal organizations.
The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of engagement with criminal organizations and proxies to achieve its strategic objectives. This article provides new evidence of the development of a CCP-linked influence-for-hire industry operating in Southeast Asia. This activity involves the Chinese government’s spreading of influence and disinformation campaigns using fake personas and inauthentic accounts on social media that are linked to transnational criminal organizations.
To investigate how the CCP is creating or acquiring inauthentic 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 out of Southeast Asia and linked to Chinese transnational criminal organizations.
ASPI’s first report on coordinated information operations linked to the Chinese government, published in 2019, found that the campaign against the Hong Kong protests used repurposed spam or marketing accounts, which were used by CCP operators to replenish their covert networks. Those personas are typically unconvincing but are cheap, created en masse and quickly adapt to avoid automated spam-detection systems. They are partly why Chinese government entities are thwarting social media platforms’ latest efforts to counter influence operations and other coordinated inauthentic behavior.
In the recent campaigns targeting Australian political discourse discussed in the first part of this report, many of the accounts impersonating and targeting ASPI use Bored Ape Yacht Club images as profiles. Those profiles are popular across many spam networks related to NFTs (non-fungible tokens), but they’re also used by multiple accounts posting links to Warner International.
Likewise, accounts promoting Warner International are using similar AI-generated profile images on inauthentic accounts involved in CCP influence operations. A Twitter account named ‘Cassandra Anderson’ has a profile image that appears to have been generated by ‘This Artwork Does not Exist’ and matches other similar AI-generated artworks used as profile images by accounts previously linked to the CCP.
