EFFORTPOST Gambling! Slavery! Electrocution! Find out how Alice Guo became the most hated woman in the Philippines

POGOs

One quick bit of introduction first, what is a POGO? Gambling is illegal (with some exceptions) in much of Asia (China, Korea, Japan). A Philipine Offshore Gaming Operator is a company physically located in the Phillippines that meets those gamblers' needs across the internet. Some have huge compounds where their hordes of Chinese workers toil away at computers and phones all day. It's a pretty sketchy business to begin with, but POGOs attract all kinds of other vices. Those compounds supply prostitution, drugs, and obviously gambling to the local Filipino population as well. They branch out from internet gambling to scams against mainland Chinese: selling bullshit cryptocurrency or just a traditional catfishing love scam. And some of them might even violate labor regulations.

Zun Yuan Technology Incorporated

Feb 25 - A Vietnamese man tells police that he escaped from a POGO in the town of Bamban he had been forced to work in. A Malaysian also reports that fricked-up stuff is going on there, like torturing people with electricity.

Bamban, a city of 78,000 in central Luzon. The roofs are that cheap because they're just going to get blown away by a typhoon in 1-2 years anyway.

Mar 13 - The POGO compound ("Zun Yuan Technology Incorporated") is raided by law enforcement led by the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC). Everybody shows up:

the Philippine National Police (PNP) Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG), Integrity Monitoring Enforcement Group (IMEG), Intelligence Group (IG), Women and Children Protection Center (WCPC), and the [Army's] Northern Luzon Command (NOLCOM)

Notably missing are the local Bamban police and the regional command of the National Police. It's a good thing they brought help because the place is enormous, a 10 hectare (25 acre) compound with 36 buildings, including barracks, villas with secret tunnels, and an Olympic-size swimming pool. Evidence of their crimes was all over the place, most obviously the huge number of cell phones used in their scams. There's chaos trying to sort out hundreds of people from different countries.

Around this time a very interesting comment is made on a Youtube video:

Ask the Mayor of that municipality,Shes a friend of the chinese builders of that compound,Shes a chinese also,of course someone would leak their operation,The Mayor and Chief of Police of that town are very close,also ask the Brgy.officials of Annupul,they know who built that placa,the same Chinese group who funded the Mayors campaign

I wonder if that will come up again later.

When I say "compound", this is what I'm talking about.

Mar 16 - The scale of this operation is revealed:

At least 658 foreign and Filipino workers were found... 383 Filipinos, 202 Chinese, 54 Vietnamese, 13 Malaysians, two Indonesians, two Rwandans, a Taiwanese, and a Kyrgyz. The PAOCC said at least 280 foreigners from the said list have no documents to legally stay in the country

Just finding a place to keep these people while they were sorted out would be a challenge, but fortunately another similar POGO operation had been raided earlier and had lots of empty buildings to use now.

There's also 38 vehicles parked there with switched license plates. The first arrests are made: 8 foreigners (mostly Chinese) and 1 Filipino.

Joann Manabat, who I'm stealing all my information from, at the compound raid. She randomly speaks English 20% of the time so you can basically tell what's going on.

Mar 26 - The mayor Alice Guo seems to keep popping up in the investigation. A Ford Expedition registered to her was among the vehicles found in the compound. Her name is on an application for "Hongsheng Gaming Technology Incorporated", a company that just happens to be located at the very same compound. By now the Senate has begun investigating what the heck is going on.

Well, isn't she chipper?

Apr 6 - It turns out that 6 of the Chinese found in the compound are wanted back on the mainland for various crimes.

fraud, illegally crossing the national border, running a gambling house, aiding information network criminal activities, and creating disturbances.

Apr 9 - Cops using acetylene torches break into 11 safes found on the property. They still have 16 left to go. It's difficult work as they keep running into unexpected problems. All of the welders in the area were busy "attending a seminar" every angle grinder had vanished.

By now a serious investigation of the local officials in Bamban has begun. Mayor Guo insists she has nothing to hide:

Guo said the allegations are unfounded as the crimes of human trafficking, torture, and illegal detention are intolerable. She said she has been "unfairly persecuted" without real investigation.

Don't worry honey, you'll get a real investigation all right.

Don't you just want to wipe that smile off her face?

Apr 11 - The remaining safes are breached. Not much cash is found but there is a huge number of cell phones and crypto wallets to sift through as well as some of the slaves' documents.

A Malaysian and a Vietnamese, Dylan and Danny, were among the foreign nationals who reported torture and abuse in the facility. Dylan was bought for P300,000 to work for Zun Yuan while Danny escaped from the Baofu compound on February 25.

The beating heart of corruption in Bamban. It doesn't look so scary tbh.

May 7 - Mayor Guo appears before a Senate committee to explain herself. She denies any connection to "Zun Yuan Technology Incorporated" or "Hong Sheng Gaming Technology Incorporated" (the old name of the company). She isn't terribly convincing as there are many financial records tying her to it.

The most interesting part of her testimony has nothing to do with crime or POGOs. Guo was evasive when asked about her business dealings but she was also evasive when asked basic questions about who the heck she is and where she comes from. Through a series of coincidences she just happens to have left no paper trail while growing up. She was born at home and never bothered to get a birth certificate until she was 17. She was homeschooled all the way through high school and never went to college. She was raised by her father on the family hog farm. One day in 2022 she decided to run for mayor, with her campaign funded by the generous contributions of the friends she made while hog farming. A senator remarked on how she was truly a political outsider:

Figuratively you came out of nowhere then you became mayor? That's okay, a refreshing break from our political dynamics.

WTF

So WTF is going on here? Who is Alice Guo? Where did she come from? Why does she have to hide it? Why do Filipinos care so much about this case in the first place?

Guo is a Chinese name. There have been Filipinos of Chinese descent going back centuries, at least to the time of the Manila Galleons. There are something like a million Chinese Filipinos today and a large part of the population has some Chinese blood. They excelled in business and today are among the most prominent families, even being elected President. For the most part we're not talking about these people today, although they're probably catching some heat from this too.

Notice she's going to be the first "lady mayor" of Bamban. I guess they have "it's her turn" over there too.

We're talking about a very different group of people, the ones who have just arrived during the Duterte presidency (2016-2022). Under Duterte's corrupt China-friendly rule, visas were sold to Chinese illegal immigrants and they flooded in to work in the POGOs that were sprouting up by the hundreds. These brought with them unruly new neighbors as well as every kind of vice. They were also obviously used for Chinese intelligence operations and deeper penetration of the legitimate economy. Filipinos are tired of having a bunch of lowlife foreign criminals coming and taking over their country. At the same time they are outraged at another more traditional kind of Chinese invasion, the military occupation of their territory. With this much hostility to mainland China, the public is curious to know how she suddenly appeared in their country and who she really works for.

Will they get their answers? Can Alice Guo do anything to make herself even more hated? Who knows? I've only gotten to May so far and the investigation is still going irl. I'll try to eventually catch up to now so that we can watch events unfold in real time.