Cooperation with Foreign Jurisdictions to Disrupt Cross-border Vape Supply Chains

Mr Jackson Lam asked the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Minister for Health (a) how the Ministry works with overseas platforms and foreign jurisdictions to disrupt cross-border vape supply chains; and (b) how effective have current blocking and takedown measures been over the past two years.

The Minister of State for Health (Ms Rahayu Mahzam) (for the Minister for Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Minister for Health): Mr Speaker, the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA), the Central Narcotics Bureau and the Singapore Police Force (SPF) engage in information sharing with their foreign counterparts. With the help of intelligence sharing, in 2025, joint operations between the Health Sciences Authority (HSA) and ICA detected 59 large-scale smuggling cases, seizing around 230,000 e-vaporisers and related products.

HSA works with e-commerce, social media and messaging platforms to remove online listings of e-vaporisers. HSA also collaborates with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and the Online Criminal Harms Act Office under SPF to block e-vaporiser websites targeting locals. Over 10,000 online advertisements, including those found on messaging platforms, were removed in 2024 and 2025.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I have two supplementary questions. First supplementary question, what proportion of the vape listings removed were hosted on overseas platform beyond Singapore's jurisdiction? Second, whether stronger legal tools are needed to address overseas-based sellers?

Mr Speaker, to date, from our records, approximately 99% of the sites taken down are linked to overseas posts that appear on platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WeChat, YouTube and Telegram, and the remaining are more local platforms like Carousel and Lazada.

On the second question, certainly, we will continue to look at how to improve our efforts in enforcement, but we are not without levers. We already have a cadence of operations that HSA does. On a daily basis, there is a surveillance done with bots to target commercial sites, to trawl and see what other sites that are offending that we need to take down. This is complimented by the efforts by HSA officers who look at the social media sites. We also work off the tip-offs, ad hoc tip-offs from public and partner agencies. Once the offending sites are taken down, we will work together with IMDA, SPF and the Online Criminal Health Acts Office to block specific vape commercial sites.

So, there are already efforts in place and also, we look at the various platforms on a regular basis to see how we can further improve our efforts. This is an ongoing effort. We do take a multi-pronged approach as well. It is not just about the enforcement but also about educating the public and our people in understanding and reporting some of these sites that are available online.