LETTER FROM BAMBAN
Alice Guo, 38, the mayor of Bamban, a small town of 80,000 people two hours north of Manila, is Chinese. And she played a central role in setting up a huge Chinese online fraud center in her town. This scandal and its many ramifications, set against the backdrop of the Sino-Philippine conflict in the South China Sea, have kept the Filipino public on tenterhooks for six months.
It all started in March, when the Philippine anti-gang police, the Presidential Commission on Organized Crime (Paocc), carried out a night raid on a large office complex in Bamban. A young Vietnamese man with signs of beatings had fled earlier. And the Malaysian embassy was alerted by one of its nationals, who claims to be held there against his will.
The police discovered 678 employees – including 383 Filipinos, 218 Chinese, fifty-five Vietnamese and sixteen Malaysians – in the complex called Baofu Land, where a company holding a POGO (Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator) license operates, i.e. offshore gaming. These online casinos aimed at foreign players, particularly Chinese, authorized on the initiative of President Rodrigo Duterte (2016-2022) from 2016, hide, especially since the pandemic, cyberscam operations under the control of Chinese mafias, a scourge in Southeast Asia: victims are harpooned on dating sites and encouraged to invest in cryptocurrencies, before losing everything. The “little hands” of these criminal activities are also sequestered, and some tortured.
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Smartphones, SIM cards, torture chamber…
Baofu Land’s POGO, already the target of a raid a year earlier for irregularities, seems to be one of them. In the offices, the police discovered hundreds of smartphones, SIM cards and a torture chamber. Most of the Chinese employees do not have work permits. Several have suffered abuse.
When The World visited the site in June, behind the sealed glass doors, Chinese lanterns and Mandarin inscriptions could be seen. The brand new complex covers 7 hectares, has thirty-two two- or three-story buildings and a 50-meter-long swimming pool. Above all, it is separated by a vacant lot from the town hall building, a sort of two-story wedding hall painted pink.
This is where Alice Leal Guo, elected in 2022, officiated. Very quickly, it appears that almost everything in Baofu Land’s accounts bears the trace, and the name, of the young city councilor. She was the one who invested in the land in 2019 to build the complex with Chinese partners. She was also the one who had obtained a first POGO license under her predecessor. She withdrew from this company to run for mayor, but invoices are still in her name, as is a vehicle found on site. She is also the head of a dozen companies – pig farming, slaughterhouse, butcher’s, real estate – and has owned a helicopter and several luxury cars.
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