A few hours after Opposition Leader Bernard Grech invited PM Robert Abela to address “fake news tactics” aimed to disturb voters, the Nationalist Party’s own media became the victim of one such attack.

A fake story on a fake website called netnewsmt.com (see below) was making the rounds soon after Grech’s invitation, and spoke about Nationalist MP Jason Azzopardi being a cocaine user.

Azzopardi, who is also the lawyer for the Caruana Galizia family, has been a target for scammers.

A PN statement said that these “invented stories” are intended to undermine the PN parliamentary group, and also to try to silence the party from doing its duties.

The PN will be filing a police report on the matter, and once again called for the strengthening of cymbercrime laws before the election.

This is the latest in a series of incidents that have been reported in the past few days.

Scammers have also tried to catfish journalists with fake emails, the latest being purportedly sent by Azzopardi and civil society activist Manuel Delia.

Another website was also hit by the scammers.

Strada Rjali said that a false version of its website was created containing an article alleging that PN MP Jason Azzopardi tried to bribe Edward Zammit Lewis to confess that he did business with Yorgen Fenech. The official Strada Rjali team said that this is a fake post not penned by them.