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AKARTA: The Jakarta Police are currently observing seven websites that have forged popular online news outlets while distributing false information on politics.

Jakarta Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Rikwanto said on Wednesday that the creators of those websites might be subject to criminal charges for publishing fabricated news.

The police, he said, were still in coordination with the Press Council because the cases and violations were related to the Press Law.

'€œThe news organizations that have fallen victim in the case have become aware of those websites, but we have not received complaints from them yet,'€ he said.

On the heels of the announcement of the result of the country'€™s presidential election, several news portals have emerged with names similar to already established news websites, such as tempo.co, kompas.com, detik.com, antaranews.com, inilah.com, liputan6.com and tribunnews.com.

The fake news sites use the subdomain '€œ'€”news.com'€ after its domain, for example antaranews.com'€”news.com.

A Press Council member, Nezar Patria, said that the creators of those websites had showed bad intentions by trying to manipulate information.

'€œThey want to borrow the domain names of mainstream media outlets to spread hoaxes, hoping to fool the public into thinking that the news pieces are from credible sources,'€ Nezar said. He urged the Communications and Information Ministry to ban the fake news sites immediately before they had adverse impacts on communities fooled by the misleading news.

Internet security expert Ruby Alamsyah said that the fraudsters who created the bogus news sites had breached the Information and Electronic Transaction Law by falsifying the actual websites'€™ subdomain to mislead the public. He said the police could directly investigate the case without formal complaints from the actual portals'€™ owners.