Shades of gray: How PH ended up with a POGO crisis

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Pogohab. A poga device reproduced in a detention office office and a Pasai detention building that PAOCC was rebuilt under the room.

Offshore gambling was a gray adjustment area every time. Immediately, she started a criminal job and fell into a larg e-scale economic "gray list."

This was when Rodrigo Duterte, unfortunately, the famous mayor of Davao Megapolis swears as the 16th president of the Philippines and collected a private office in the Azinald cafeteria in Malakanyan. Ta.

"The online gambling must be stopped," Duterte told his office members.

In fact, the commander dreamed that this was a difficult order, but several months later he returned to this issue. On December 22, 2016, the President accepted the conclusion: "Order to stop all online games (business). Lehaat. Walang Silbi ITO.

Looking from the outside, it looked like a harsh rhetoric for online gambling, but it was just a meaning theory. Since returning to September of such a year, his Philippine rest and gambling company (Pagcor) has now been blamed or Philippine offshore game operators. In December, when DUTERS ordered all online games to silence, the lon g-standing Pagcor Chairman Andrea Domingo was preparing to develop offshore gambling through Pogo.

"The venture covers the cost of electric games and electric bing," said Domingo in 2016.

Semantics and a gray area

The Republican Bill 9487 gave Pagcor the authority to regulate gambling, card games and games with quantity. This law did not describe "offshore gambling". However, as a result, many petitions have been submitted to compete for Pogo's constitutionality, but has not yet been solved. (In the Supreme Court ruling in March 2024, one petition was rejected for formal reasons for violating the court.)

In the offshore gambling model, the bet is overseas, and the bed is performed in the cloud or online. As a result, Chinese players can bet in the mainland of China, where gambling is prohibited. Sites, direct broadcasts, meals, dealers, and all of them are located in the Philippines through outsourcin g-discrete business processes (BPOs), which function as a proposal provider.

People who support gambling every time that the Philippines has no online games is the result of the actual game in another space.

"This is a gra y-like bazaar, a gra y-like zone," a former police officer Wally Sonbero was taken in an interview with a plapler in 2017, and as a result, he cooperated with King Jack Lama. He said before he was convicted of a bribe giving a bribe to the Immigration Bureau to release prisoners from China.

"If there is no gray market, there is no probability," he said that he had an interview with Sonbero, a strategist and a strategist.

This gray bazaar was also present in the Pogo through the management of the Kagayan Financial Zone (Seesa) managed by Enrila. The financial zone like Caza works to avoid harsh national regulations.

Cesa has approved more than 300 proposal companies at its peak, and Catholina Pontz Enlyel has announced the Adept. In 2007, he obtained a license from the Philippine Financial District Bureau (PEZA) in the Metropolitan area to introduce some houses.

CEZA's first general licenser was First Cagayan Leisure and Resort Corporation (FCLRC). At 2024 UN Drug Criminal Office (UNODC), FCLRC can be used as a casino related to a crime organization based in Kokan, a mountain area on the border between Myanmar and China.

POGO’s rise

Enrille said Pagcor Pogcor Pog o-Standards lost to Seza. "We had no opportunity to compete at this point because we strictly follow the duties stipulated in the Charter," said the Adeptor's House of Representatives on July 31.

In 2016, the immediate license with the Pagcor Pogo-operator said, "We covered unreasonable tax cuts, bypassed internal interests and registration at the securities and trading committee station, issued many sub-counters, and no next director. The group that issued a thousan d-year visa and produced countless tasks provided a provider in a game where Sonbero enters, and the contradictions with the posters that have been "erased" in itself are so long ago. He said he was called a group that defends.

Pogos were established in 2016 at the unusual time. In this year, China started a large scaling battle with illegal gambling, and has arrested 19. 000 defendants, especially across the border with Cambodia. Before gambling from China's fugitive, she has already managed a report UNODC to create a highly reliable business and investment portfolio Southeast Asia, especially in Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Philippines. " Masu.

Moreover, according to the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC), since 2016, the Philippines has seen a steady increase in the number of reports of suspicious transactions (STRs) related to casino junkies. It decreased in 2020 amid the pandemic, but has skyrocketed since 2021.

The amount of reports of casino-related spo, i. e. suspicious transactions. Source: 2023 AMLC Report

The pandemic is not the only event that has seen a decrease in suspicious transactions from 2019 to 2020. In 2019, Pagcor froze the issuance of POGO licenses amid conflicts with Pogo during the reign of the Duters. License issuance resumed in early 2020, but China and Cambodia have since resumed their bans on checks and online gaming. UNP According to the United Nations, China and Cambodia's crackdown caused a "population exodus."

The result led to the Philippines.

"After the COVID-19 outbreak, criminal groups were forced to adopt technological innovations, digitize and diversify their business models to maintain their revenue streams. Casino operators, in particular, relocated to countries and regions with poor regulation and high vulnerability, such as Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines," the UNP UN statement said.

By 2022, the number of reports of suspicious operations reached its maximum, according to AMLC monitoring.

The situation in the Philippines seemed favorable for such an outcome, as many pogo foreigners, especially Chinese, were "stuck" in the Philippines during the pandemic.

"Tourists were able to switch their visas to work visas without undergoing special inspections, leading to unregulated activities in exclusive centers that local government units (LGUs) could not control due to the national nature of the licenses," the gaming group said.

Since 2019, "180, 000 to 200, 000 Chinese citizens - Sila Na 'Yung Nagpaiko t-ikot (They rotated around pogo)," Winston Casio, head of the Paocas Offenders and Criminal Offenders Commission (PAOCC), told Rappler in an interview spent at a former pogo center in Pasay that they captured and converted into an office and detention center.

One of the detainees was not Chinese, but turned out to be Jeremy, a Malaysian who worked at a legal pogo in the Philippines in 2021.

In an interview with Rappler, he requested anonymity for fear of repercussions, and said that on Chinese New Year in February 2024, he was invited by a friend to Banban, Talal for dinner. He was taken to Pogo, Hongsheng Game Technology Co., Ltd. (later renamed Zunyuan Technology), located in a complex owned by Baofu Land Development Co., Ltd., a company registered by Alice Goh.

"He left me behind and just walked out," Jeremy says. He was forced to work at a busy center to touch the boils of love. The problem with Pogo, as it turned out later, was that their license was received by a fraud group, not an online game like Hongsheng/Zunyuan.

Jeremy said that they used their "scam phone" to secretly upload and exchange some messages that could send some data to his wife in Malaysia. These secret messages led to his rescue from Banban.

The Philippines, which according to Sombero was "almost the number one country with Gibraltar in online gaming" and a country where "money is never leaving the Philippines, it's only coming, and regulators need to capture the growth of the opportunity," quickly became "one of the biggest fraud farms in Southeast Asia," according to Casio.

TIME Developments in Pogo-related cases in the Philippines Sources: AMLC, UNODC, FATF, PAOCC, media reports.

FATF gray list

In June 2021, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) group put the Philippines on the "grey list," indicating that the Philippines has "shortcomings" in tracking and preventing illicit financial flows.

"What impact does being on the grey list have? If you're a Filipino importer, you want to import consumer goods from overseas. You're going to have to spend more dollars than if you weren't on this list," Casio said.

The Philippines promised to get off the "grey" list by 2024, but it didn't have time. The Philippines was still on the list in June 2024, when the FATF published the list. AMLC said one of the mechanisms the Philippines needs to improve is combating junk casino laundering.

The fact that Alice G. was able to leave the country reflects these shortcomings. Without a proper basis to investigate financial crimes, Paoc was forced to file complaints only when it had evidence of human trafficking. Moreover, employees who were victims of human trafficking were able to speak out quickly.

The human trafficking allegations are still under review by Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors, resulting in no arrests or trials related to her, which in effect facilitates her departure. Only the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) has actually filed a case of tax evasion. "The problem with our state is that we are weak in digital investigations. When we searched the Plains of the Sun in May 2023, how many computers were seized? They were incorporated into the return of the search warrant that must be submitted to the court.

At the POGO center in Pasay, an isolator for POGO center employees that Paoc made in his office was exposed. Photo: Ulysis Pontanares/Rappler

Dozens of workers caught in Paocc's raids are being held at the Pasay Center, and some of them have begun to seek release from custody by filing habeas corpus petitions and emergency court orders. Paocc, meanwhile, has said he is the accused, the others are witnesses, and the three are victims. "That's a pretty tough bar," Cascio says.

Sister Guo Sila and Pogo co-worker Cassandra Lee Ong were captured in Indonesia and are being held by Philippine authorities without charges. Alice Guo is still at large, but she has not been charged either.

A matter that started in the gray zone is being made in the gray zone. - rappler. com