Alice Guo’s business partners in Bamban, Tarlac extend to a transnational scam enterprise that operated in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, with footprints in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and the United Kingdom — trafficking thousands, defrauding victims through cryptocurrency scams, and laundering gambling money, a Rappler investigation shows.
At least four persons of interest, originally Chinese citizens, have been linked directly or indirectly to Guo, the detained and dismissed mayor of a once sleepy town in Tarlac. The direct ties were traced to her business deals, while the indirect associations emerged from her business partner.
Guo’s business partners Huang Zhiyang and the couple Zhang Ruijin and Lin Baoying have been established as fugitives in congressional investigations, while Rappler’s examination of company records revealed another name: Dingkai Wang, who is connected to Huang through the raided Sun Valley Clark Hub Corporation in Mabalacat, Pampanga.
The couple, who are holders of multiple passports, were convicted of money laundering, while Dingkai Wang, a naturalized Cambodian, is linked to fraud in Cambodia and Hong Kong. Huang Zhiyang, who is being hunted for his involvement in alleged high-stakes financial scams, helped Guo set up her business at a time when the Philippines became the next staging point of scam gangs that had been forced out of Cambodia and China. This was during the term of then-president Rodrigo Duterte, who opened the Philippines to Chinese trade and business.
These persons of interest are linked to more personalities who have been the subjects of money laundering investigations in Singapore and sanctions by the United Kingdom. All of them are in the radar of United Nations agencies tracking cross-border crimes.
This notorious network penetrated the Philippines through Guo and the Duterte-time creation, the now banned POGO (Philippine offshore gaming operator) hubs.
Huang Zhiyang
Huang Zhiyang was Guo’s co-incorporator in a real estate company called Baofu Land Development Incorporated, set up on May 3, 2019. Baofu was the lessor of the two POGOs that were raided in 2023 and 2024, after trafficked and tortured victims escaped and filed complaints.
Guo’s Baofu was not Huang’s only POGO venture in Central Luzon. Earlier in May 2018, Huang became a nominal shareholder in the incorporation of Sun Valley Clark located in the Clark Freeport Zone.
Sun Valley is a cluster of commercial and residential buildings whose occupants engaged in crypto scam operations that used trafficked victims. The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (Pagcor) canceled its POGO license in May 2023.
Guo told the Senate last May that she knows Huang only because she supplied him with pork, which he needed for his many restaurants in Clark, Pampanga.
Addressing senators in Filipino on May 22, Guo said, “He has many restaurants, I was selling him pork. Our transactions were okay, he was kind.” She also described him as a nice person who always brought her gifts from his travels.
The reason why Huang traveled so much was because he operated in different parts of the world. Born in Fujian province in China, Huang obtained his first foreign citizenship in 2015 from St. Kitts and Nevis, a country in the Caribbean notorious for being a tax haven and where a lot of criminals go using investors’ visas.
On January 25, 2019, Huang — who already had businesses in the Philippines — obtained a passport in Cyprus, a country whose “golden visa” program allows the quick entry of criminals.
Now facing multiple criminal charges, Guo wants to pin Huang Zhiyang.
Dingkai Wang
Like Huang, Dingkai Wang is from Fujian and became a nominal shareholder of Sun Valley in Pampanga. He has no direct links to Guo as far as we know, but is part of the Huang Zhiyang network. Dingkai became a naturalized Cambodian in February 2017, based on the royal decree of his naturalization.
Dingkai used his Cambodian passport to apply for a retiree’s visa in the Philippines, our informed sources have confirmed, but they could not establish the exact date. After Sun Valley was raided in May 2023, he left the Philippines in September that same year for Japan. He did not have any derogatory record here, and has not returned since, according to our Immigration sources.
Dingkai has connections to a big scam operation in Cambodia, and some ties to a cryptocurrency fraud in Hong Kong, according to company records obtained from the Hong Kong registry.
In Cambodia, it was reportedly the Heng He group that operated scam compounds. The Heng He casino was sanctioned in 2023 by the United Kingdom under its global human rights mechanisms, for “providing support for and concealing evidence of an activity that violates the right not to be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
We discovered via the Hong Kong registry that Dingkai is connected to the Heng He group through other companies. Dingkai’s business partner in another Hong Kong company is a director of the Heng He Investment and Development Company Limited, among the group’s corporate arms, as verified through records in the Hong Kong registry and the director’s Cambodian naturalization decree.
Testimonies of the victims of the Cambodian Heng He about trafficking and forced labor, resemble the stories of over a thousand victims in Sun Valley Clark who were rescued by the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC) in May 2023.
Rappler sent messages on October 1 to all of Sun Valley’s listed email addresses to ask whether they were aware of Huang Zhiyang and Dingkai Wang’s connections to shady networks, but they have yet to respond. Rappler also emailed on October 3 a Hong Kong company listed under Dingkai, but it also has yet to respond.
Scripted scams
How exactly did scams that operated out of the Philippines, Cambodia, and other countries work?
Rappler has learned that workers are fed a script of the different personas they’d assume to lure victims into a cryptocurrency scam. These were done mostly through dating sites, with the predator using photos of either an unknowing person whose social media profiles are public, or by models employed by the hub.
They have life stories to choose from in an Excel sheet — both their personal history, or just their daily activities. In Sun Valley, there were stock photos as inane as a McFlurry, or as stimulating as a financial literacy book, ready to be sent to the victim who might ask what the predator is doing at a particular moment.
Although Huang Zhiyang and Dingkai Wang were nominal shareholders in Sun Valley, two companies registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) — another tax haven — owned the majority, according to its incorporation records filed with the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission. One of these is Hanyip Limited, a company registered in Hong Kong and founded by Dingkai, according to a document filed with Hong Kong’s company register.
Hanyip raises suspicions because its listed address in the Hong Kong registry is the same office as Vico Capital Limited, owned by the same boss of a cryptocurrency trading platform in Hong Kong that went bankrupt. The Heng He group’s Dingben Wang also registers companies to this address (see diagram). The trading platform also allegedly defrauded thousands of people, local HK01 news reported in 2022.
For still unexplained reasons, neither Huang Zhiyang nor Dingkai Wang, nor any of the Sun Valley incorporators were included in the trafficking, cybercrime and illegal detention indictment of the justice department in May 2023. In the complaints filed over the Bamban and Porac, Pampanga POGOs, all incorporators were sued under the theory that they were all part of a criminal system.
Rappler asked the Department of Justice (DOJ) on October 3, October 7, and again on October 14, why the incorporators were not charged, but the different officials we asked have yet to respond.
The license of the raided POGO inside the hub has been forfeited, and the buildings in the complex have been locked, according to the Clark Development Corporation, the government corporation that manages the Clark economic zone.
Guo and the Singapore money laundering case
After she bought hectares of land in Bamban, Guo said she offered an investment opportunity to her client Huang Zhiyang. That offer materialized in the form of Baofu. Huang used his newly-obtained Cypriot passport to put in P175,000, making him 14% owner, while Guo owned 50%. A Filipino, Rachelle Carreon, who is now detained, owned 10%.
The remaining 26% was evenly shared between Huang’s connections, Zhang Ruijin and his girlfriend Lin Baoying. The pair would eventually be found guilty of laundering illegal money through luxury residentials – among others – in Singapore.
Guo said that it was Huang Zhiyang who brought in Zhang and Lin. “Ang kausap ko lang po ay si Huang Zhiyang, ang katuwiran ko po that time, since akin naman po ‘yung lupa, majority po nasa akin, wala pong mawawala po sa akin,” Guo told the Senate in May.
(I was only in talks with Huang Zhiyang, and my thinking at the time was, since I own the land, I own the majority, I wouldn’t lose anything.)
At the time of the Baofu incorporation, Huang, Zhang, and Lin were all living in Fontana in Clark, Pampanga, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents.
With a foothold in the Philippines, the couple Lin and Zhang put up another company in London in January 2019, named Jinying Invest Company Limited. They listed the Philippines as their address, according to their filing with the United Kingdom’s Department for Business and Trade.
The Singapore trial uncovered how Lin and Zhang’s network “had earned millions through online gambling platforms located in several under-regulated offshore jurisdictions,” including the Philippines, according to a newly-published report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
The first POGO in Baofu to be raided was Hongsheng Gaming Technologies, busted by the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC) in February 2023. Around this same period, the couple Zhang and Lin would settle at a luxurious residential enclave in Sentosa Cove in Singapore where they would be found guilty of laundering the dirty money they earned from their Philippine POGO operation.
It was in Sentosa, too, that the two were arrested in August 2023, according to a report by The Straits Times, for what Singaporean authorities described as the biggest money laundering case in their country. In this scheme, money from illegal sources overseas was stashed through banks, mansions, luxury cars, jewelries, and designer bags.
“While the full extent and exact sources of their wealth is not known, the charges largely focused on laundering of funds acquired through illegal online gambling activities, specifically in the Philippines,” said the UNODC.
Arm of the law does not reach far
Also in August 2023, local police in China had put out a wanted notice for Huang Zhiyang. Zibo police said Huang Zhiyang was among 15 suspects in cross-border online gambling crimes found to be “illegally staying abroad.”
Though convicted in Singapore for money laundering, the couple Zhang Ruijin and Lin Baoying were sentenced to only 15 months. In June 2024, they were deported to Cambodia, according to Singapore’s Business Times.
They are also wanted in the Philippines, along with Huang Zhiyang, for human trafficking related to the POGO operations inside Baofu. The three have not been found, leaving Guo behind to be detained over non-bailable charges of human trafficking.
The Philippine network ties back to Singapore through other links. One is through Wang Baosen, the third person to be convicted in the Singapore money laundering case.
“According to court documents, Wang Baosen also admitted to working at Hongli International which was located in the Clark Freeport area in Pampanga, later moving to Bavet City, Cambodia,” said the UNODC report.
Another link is through Dingkai Wang’s associates in his Hong Kong companies, including Su Jinkun, who lists multiple residential and correspondent addresses in Dubai, Hong Kong, and China that overlap with the fellow money laundering suspects of Zhang and Lin. Dingkai’s other business associate, Su Weiyi of the Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange, also shares company ownerships with members of Singapore’s money laundering gang. (see diagram)
Through open doors
The Philippines was an attractive destination for scam syndicates fleeing the crackdowns in China and Cambodia. When PAOCC raided the Bamban POGO Zun Yuan in March 2024, six Chinese fugitives were among the 201 Chinese citizens found to be working there.
They were able to obtain visas to the Philippines because, according to the Bureau of Immigration, in the application process, the Philippines has no inkling of their criminal records.
“Normally, these fugitives are tagged by their countries as wanted criminals after they have been issued visas and/or entered the country. In many cases, their governments inform the BI about their cases only after the fact that they have entered or been caught in the Philippines,” Immigration spokesperson Dana Sandoval told Rappler.
The Philippines is currently requesting foreign governments for more efficient data-sharing, said Sandoval.
“Is this latest influx part of that long-standing trend [of the Chinese diaspora] or is this something else? There is the potential that Chinese criminal elements have relocated to our country, having found a safe haven here,” Ashley Acedillo, director general of the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, told the Senate on October 8.
In a January 2024 report, the UNODC said casino syndicates “infiltrated” countries like the Philippines because we do not “possess a functioning, enforceable casino regulatory management and supervision system.”
That’s a kind way of saying we have a highly corruptible system. Congress has recommended a slew of amendments to existing laws covering corporations, anti-drug policies, and cyber operations, spurred by leads showing the POGO network’s links to the illegal drug trade.
“Itinayo ang mga POGO gamit ang salaping pinagbentahan ng iligal na droga. Ginamit ang salaping ito upang bilhin ang ating mga kawani ng gobyerno at mga opisyal. Sila ang nagsilbing protektor ng mga dayuhang ito…. ginisa tayo sa sarili nating mantika,” said House quad committee chairman Representative Ace Barbers.
(POGOs were set up using money from illegal drugs. This same money was used to buy off government personnel and officials. They protected these foreigners…. we were taken advantage of.) – with reports from Joann Manabat/Rappler.com
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) contributed to this report
