9/24/21, 7:33 PM Facebook shut down commercial disinformation network based in Myanmar and Vietnam | by @DFRLab | DFRLab | Medium Table showing the chronology of the Wave Money posts across the network, using the UNIX timestamps retrieved from the source code of each post’s page. (Source: @jean_leroux/DFRLab via Facebook) Smart Life for Myanmar published the first post against Wave Money, on 11:35:22 UTC. Over the next three minutes, the other five pages in the network replicated the post on their respective pages. Notably, none of the pages “shared” any posts published by the other assets in the network, despite the content being identical. Instead each page copied and published the Wave Money post as an original post. This points to an element of subterfuge: the page administrators wanted to drive the Wave Money narrative but may have hoped to avoid any associations and links between the assets pushing the content. The *31# Campaign On October 19, 2019, all six assets published a sequence of photos that promised mobile phone users 10 gigabytes of data if they dialed the code “*31#” from their phones. These images were stylized to resemble the major mobile operators in Myanmar. The provided code, however, was a “man-machine interface (MMI)” code, which are used to access hidden options on the handset when they are entered. When dialed, the *31# code disables a handset’s outgoing caller identification function. According to users in the comments of these posts, as well as some online forums, this had the secondary effect of also blocking the user from making any calls on the Burmese network using that handset. Conveniently, MyTel’s official Facebook page posted a solution to this problem a day before the assets ran the “promotion.” By dialing #31#, caller identification would be reenabled on the device and service restored… thanks to MyTel. https://medium.com/dfrlab/facebook-shut-down-commercial-disinformation-network-based-in-myanmar-and-vietnam-d8c07c518c04 12/15