Gaming is legal in the Philippines by virtue of Republic Act 9487 — the amended version of all the laws before it that created the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (Pagcor), and which authorized the agency to regulate gaming and gambling.
Nowhere in the law, however, was offshore gaming mentioned. But in September 2016, in the same period that former president Rodrigo Duterte was lambasting online gaming in his speeches, Pagcor, under its former chief Andrea Domingo created POGOs or Philippine offshore gaming operators.
By February 2017, Duterte issued Executive Order No. 13 or EO 13, which “clarified” online gaming jurisdictions.
Rappler has traced the origins of the POGO saga, how it branched out to scamming and criminalities, and explains the role that dismissed Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo plays in it. Below we will show the timeline of developments based on information we’ve gathered from documents, congressional testimonies, interviews, and intelligence from sources inside and outside government. Bookmark this page as Rappler continues to follow and investigate the POGO issue.
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The root of all evil
EO 13, for many stakeholders, was the root of all evil. That is what Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (CEZA) blames. Its CEO, Katrina Ponce Enrile, said EO 13 resulted in the multi-layered design of offshore gaming, which criminal sub-licensees exploited.
Good governance advocates had run to the Supreme Court as early as 2017 to void POGOs, saying that Pagcor had no authority to create and regulate online gambling. Only after six years did the Supreme Court decide the issue, but its decision was to junk all of these cases in April 2023 on procedural grounds, saying the petitioners did not follow the proper hierarchy of courts. The Supreme Court avoided, as it had on several occasions, discussing the constitutionality of a contentious issue.
Without a court ban, POGOs were set up and thrived under Duterte. They had been scrutinized before, spurred by complaints of a sudden influx of Chinese who rented condominium units and other residential houses.
Offshore gaming was a gray area, and it presented a billion-dollar opportunity to the Philippine economy. With betting done on the cloud, the Philippines could provide thousands of jobs to workers who would take care of the streaming, payroll, and other processes.
It also presented the Philippines as the next destination of casino syndicates that were fleeing the Golden Triangle because of a strong crackdown by authorities there, particularly China and Cambodia. Reports from the Anti-Money Laundering Council saw a spike of suspicious transactions related to casinos by 2016. Opposition Senator Risa Hontiveros said, “We don’t even need to establish that [Duterte] is a protector dahil panahon talaga niya binuksan ang bansa natin sa POGO operations (because it was during his time that we opened our country to POGO operations).”
When Duterte finished his term, the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC) under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. intensified its crackdown on illegal POGOs. “Illegal” meant that these hubs obtained a POGO license (later renamed an Internet Gaming License or IGL) but were operating something else — often a scam hub that operated with criminal activities such as torture and prostitution.
The POGO investigation heightened when PAOCC raided the Hongsheng Gaming Technology Inc. in Bamban, Tarlac in February 2023. A year after, in February 2024, PAOCC received information that a Vietnamese had escaped from a POGO called Zun Yuan Technology Inc., which was located in the same compound as Hongsheng. The Vietnamese wanted to be rescued.
Zun Yuan Technology Inc. also operated from the same compound in Bamban. When operatives raided it, they found and seized evidence of torture and scamming activities — and discovered something else. Why were documents inside the compound naming the town mayor Alice Guo? The documents ranged from electric bills to a local government permit. Guo immediately became the central figure of what would become sensational and months-long congressional investigations. Investigators would also find out that Guo incorporated the real estate firm Baofu in 2019, which then leased the compound to POGOs.
Guo’s entire life was picked apart. Who was her mother, her father, where did she grow up? All the government agencies that have been investigating her come to one conclusion: that Alice Guo is the Chinese national Guo Ha Ping. This discovery branched out to bigger questions of accountability: from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), that allegedly gave Guo a late registration of birth despite questionable processes, the Bureau of Immigration (BI) for not being able to flag the presence in the country of personalities who turned out to be fugitives wanted in China and Singapore, and Pagcor for failing to do exhaustive probity checks on those who obtained licenses from them.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also faced questions for its failure to flag the Chinese fugitives who incorporated these companies. The Filipinos who registered the companies with the SEC are now claiming that their identities were stolen, and their signatures forged. In the end, when it was time to face the court for the non-bailable charge of human trafficking, only these Filipinos surrendered. Their Chinese bosses are nowhere to be found.
With an arrest warrant from the Senate for contempt, Guo and her siblings fled the Philippines in late July. This irked not just senators, but President Marcos himself who promised that those proven to have helped Guo escape would face charges. The government has not revealed who its suspects are, but Immigration Commissioner Norman Tansingco was fired because higher-ups were dissatisfied with his work.
In less than a month, Indonesian authorities managed to do the job that Philippine authorities had failed to do: catch Guo, her sister Shiela, and their alleged business associate, the 24-year-old Katherine Cassandra Li Ong. Ong has denied to this day being a POGO operator in Porac, Pampanga, despite documents showing her transacting with Pagcor on behalf of these POGOs.
By the time of the Porac raid, the business model became clearer — a real estate company sets up shop, and rents out its compound to the Pagcor licensees, thereby distancing itself from the POGOs and creating a layer that makes it hard for investigators to it down.
Lawmakers have been pressuring Guo and Ong to name bigger fish. They have both refused to do so, maintaining their innocence and asserting their rights against self-incrimination. Guo is currently detained at the Pasig City Female Dormitory over the non-bailable charges of human trafficking, while the same complaint against Ong, and the money laundering complaints against both are still pending before prosecutors.
Government officials have been dragged into the mess in varying capacities. For example, Guo’s divestment from Baofu was allegedly fake — who helped her? The local governments of Bamban and Porac are also in the hot seat for issuing the Letters of No Objection (LONO) to these POGOs. The Vietnamese victim in Zun Yuan in Bamban claimed that the local police had forced him to sign an affidavit promising not to sue the POGO.
The former chief of the police Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) was in hot water for firing the team that raided these POGOs. In a Senate hearing, a Pagcor official claimed that a former police chief was on Guo’s payroll. There’s also the mayor of Sual, Pangasinan, who allegedly has a relationship with Guo — something they have both denied.
Both POGOs in Bamban and Porac hired one consultant to transact with Pagcor on their behalf: Dennis Cunanan, the former head of the state-run Technology and Livelihood Resource Center who had already been convicted of graft for his role in the pork barrel scam. Cunanan has likewise already been ordered arrested for the qualified trafficking charge pending in a Pasig court.
The real estate firm in Porac, the equivalent of Guo’s Baofu, hired one high-profile lawyer to handle an ejectment suit — no less than Harry Roque, Duterte’s former presidential spokesperson. Roque turned out to have helped Ong set up the meetings with Pagcor when Lucky South 99 was renewing its POGO license.
Moreover, Ong had allowed Roque’s former Malacañang assistant, student pilot AR dela Serna, to stay in the Porac compound for free. A Chinese man disguised as a Cambodian, and who is wanted in China for an investment scam, was caught in Roque’s house in Tuba, Benguet. Roque is evading a House of Representatives arrest warrant over contempt.
At this junction, here is what we know: the scam hub design is layered for a purpose, beginning with a lessor who could disassociate himself or herself from whatever crimes are alleged in operations. One would apply for a POGO license, and business process outsourcing (BPO) entities would pay to use the facilities, including strong internet connections. These BPOs could also be running some hubs.
Sources privy to how this world works told Rappler that Guo and Ong may be minor players. Government investigators have yet to pinpoint the major players, but they are sure to be pursuing one lead – the Yang brothers, or the brothers of Duterte’s former economic adviser Michael Yang.
The middle brother Hongjiang Yang has a joint bank account with Zhengcan Yu/Yu Zheng Can, one of the incorporators of Bamban’s Hongsheng, according to the Anti-Money Laundering Council. That account has been frozen by the Court of Appeals. The financial investigation also revealed that Guo’s other company once deposited a substantial amount to a company that has been flagged for illegal drug trade.
The eldest brother, Jianxin Yang/Tony Yang, had just been arrested on the basis of being an undesirable alien, but he is also being investigated for being the lessor of a POGO in Cagayan de Oro City. Tony Yang’s steel company, which has its own port, has also raised suspicions. The House quad committee believes it is close to exposing the big, bad world of POGOs, drugs, and Chinese criminals.
In all of this, the losers are the honest-to-goodness laborers of POGOs, especially the legal ones, who face unemployment by the end of the year because of an all-out ban. The owners can just hop on to another type of gaming license.
– Rappler.com
