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Philippine authorities have raided an illegal online gambling operation in the major central city of Cebu, the first such operation in the area, rescuing 162 allegedly captive foreign workers.
The multi-agency raid led by the Bureau of Immigration rescued and detained the foreigners on Saturday (August 31) after a request from the Indonesian Embassy to rescue several Indonesian nationals.
The raid on the Tourist Garden Hotel resort on Mactan Island in Cebu’s Lapu-Lapu City is the first operation against a major online gambling or cyber-scamming compound in the Visayas or the central Philippines.
The discovery of yet another large number of captive foreign employees adds weight and urgency to official concerns that more than 400 illegal operations remain active throughout the country.
It is also the first large raid on an online gambling operation since Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced a ban on foreign-facing online gambling operations (POGOs) in July.
Immigration officials, police and child protection officers took 83 Chinese nationals, 70 Indonesians, six Burmese, two Taiwanese and one Malaysian into custody. Ten of the foreigners are minors, according to Winston Casio, spokesperson for the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC).
Five Filipinos were also detained on suspicion of managing the gambling operation inside the Tourist Garden Hotel compound, a property that has targeted Chinese tourists.
On Monday, the mayor of Lapu-Lapu City, a sub-region of Cebu City that includes the tourist hub of Mactan Island, shut down the hotel and the operations of four tenant companies with Chinese names.
Mayor Junard Chan told the Philippine Inquirer daily that the raided operation had “secretly and quietly” arrived from Pampanga Province, north of Manila, in recent months amid raids on similar operations in the area.
It was not immediately clear if the captive staff at the Cebu facility were refugees from the Pampanga operation raided in June that was allegedly involved in sex trafficking and torture.
That raided property has been linked to a March 2024 raid in Tarlac Province, just to the north of Pampanga, that unravelled a syndicate allegedly including Alice Guo, a local mayor who forged her Philippine citizenship and has fled the country amid allegations of espionage.
Cebu police had previously denied the existence of POGO-style operations in the province following the closure last year of five online gambling operations that had been under police surveillance.
The Philippines’ embattled POGO market is on the verge of closure after President Marcos announced the surprise ban at his annual State of the Nation address.
However, top gambling regulator Alejandro Tengco, the CEO of PAGCOR, continues to advocate for the industry, suggesting that certain support services for global online gambling companies may survive Marcos’ eventual order on the matter.
Uncertainty also remains on whether Marcos’ ban will extend to a small number of foreign-facing online gambling operations based in remote Cagayan Province, under the watch of the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (CEZA).
CEZA-outsourced companies were the original licensors and nourishers of the bulk of the Philippines’ super-charged online gambling industry, with many if not most of these licensees working out of business towers in Makati City in Metro Manila.
But this lucrative arrangement ended in 2017 when former President Rodrigo Duterte ordered PAGCOR to take over regulation of all online operations not based in Cagayan.
