Philippines’ Pig Butchering Poster Girl Gets Life in Prison
Onetime small town mayor Alice Guo sentenced under anti-trafficking laws
Alice Guō Huápíng ([郭華萍), the onetime small-town mayor whose mid-2024 arrest heralded growing attention to what would become one of the world’s biggest crime stories, has been sentenced to life in prison along with three others for violating Philippine anti-trafficking laws by the Pasig City Regional Trial Court in Manila.
The 35-year-old Guo billed herself as the daughter of a Chinese pig farmer and his common-law Filipina wife who expanded the pig farm, acquired a helicopter and a Ford Explorer and ran for mayor in 2022 in Bamban, a sleepy town of 75,000 population 100 km north of Manila. But police raids of a giant 36-building compound on eight hectares of land she had previously owned uncovered a sprawling center in which 800 Filipinos and other nationalities were imprisoned and forced to operate online casinos and lovelorn and investment scams known as “pig butchering,” taking money from Chinese mainland and other victims across the globe.
Guo, who was also fined PHP2 million (US$33,868), denied the allegations against her. Actually a Fujian-born Chinese national who came to the Philippines as a youngster, she still faces another five charges, including one of money-laundering. Although hysteria generated charges that she was a Chinese spy, that was never likely.
Nonetheless, the case gripped Filipinos for weeks as Guo sat through marathon Senate hearings before she suddenly disappeared, raising questions over who, if anyone in power, had helped her to flee. She was eventually arrested in Indonesia after a four-country search and turned over to Philippine authorities. It is unknown if she will appeal her sentence.
Story’s bigger implications
The bigger story is that eventually it transpired that there were nearly 300 operations like hers, big and small, scattered across the Philippines, most of them in Manila or nearby, operating officially as Philippine Online Gaming Operations, or POGOs. As the scandal unfolded, eventually President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., partly in response to concern on the part of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, ordered all the POGOs closed. Tens of thousands of mainland Chinese fled the Philippines, although it took months to root out all the POGO operations.
Among other things, the POGOs damaged the reputation of former President Rodrigo R. Duterte, who allowed the rapid expansion of their numbers as a lucrative source of tax and real estate revenue. His former spokesman Harry Roque is on the run in Dubai after he was found to be involved with an illegal POGO in Pampanga. Duterte’s former special assistant and head of the Presidential Management Staff Christopher Lawrence “Bong” Tesoro Go, is also alleged to have had ties to POGO money during Duterte’s war on drugs, which Go has denied.
The Philippines wasn’t alone. Illegal gaming operations and pig butchering scams have metastasized all over Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, as well as the Pacific islands in an epidemic that continues to take in tens of billions of dollars annually for organized crime groups, wrecking the lives of those defrauded and the hundreds of thousands forced to work in the scams. They are often co-located with legal businesses, particularly online gaming, and have evolved into what US officials called “industrial-scale cybercrime” driven by transnational criminal groups.
Cyber currencies aggravate problems
The problems have been exacerbated by the exponential growth of cybercurrencies, with their pseudo-anonymous nature complicating the tracing and recovery of stolen funds. Identifying the real-world identity behind a cryptocurrency wallet address is difficult without specialized tools or the cooperation of exchanges. Unlike traditional banking where transactions can sometimes be reversed, cryptocurrency transactions are largely irreversible. That is because once the victim’s funds are sent to the scammer’s wallet, the money is effectively gone, leaving victims with no way to recover their assets.
Cybercurrencies also allow for the rapid transfer of vast sums of money across international borders, circumventing traditional banking regulations and controls, enabling organized criminal gangs, often based in Southeast Asia, to target victims globally and quickly move the stolen funds through various exchanges and wallets to launder them.
Nor are legitimate governments spared. Singapore was hit by a two billion-dollar-plus money-laundering case by Chinese nationals allegedly involved in illegal overseas businesses, with scams possibly linked to the UK and New Zealand. The government was forced to significantly tighten its laws to combat the phenomenon.
Transnational organized cybercrime centered in Southeast Asia, and particularly Cambodia, has directly implicated Prime Minister Hun Manet and his deputy premier, Vongsey Vissoth, along with 28 other top Cambodian government and business leaders as well as officials of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, according to a 73-page report cited by Asia Sentinel on June 3.
China, US join forces
The magnitude of the problem has brought the US and China into rare alignment despite their ideological differences, with the US earlier this month launching a “Scam Center Strike Force,” according to news reports, in a bid to crack down on cryptocurrency fraud schemes that officials say have defrauded Americans of nearly US$10 billion annually.
One cryptocurrency laundering operation based in the Paranaque section of Manila allegedly scammed victims out of at least US$225 million, including the manager of a rural bank in the United States that collapsed with the loss of US$47 million and left a local church and investment fund penniless and his family and friends devastated in the tiny town of Elkhart, Kansas, population 1,888.
The US Justice Department has suggested proceeds are laundered through US-based platforms before being moved offshore. In mid-October, the US ordered the largest forfeiture action in the history of the Department of Justice, involving a scam allegedly operated by the Cambodian conglomerate Prince Holding Group, and its founding chairman, Vincent Chen Zhi, who remains on the run. US investigators seized roughly US$15 billion in alleged criminal proceeds linked to Bitcoin transactions.
The problem is that, given the fungibility of cybercurrencies and the existence of weak governing structures, the pig-butchering operations can move about as fast as new tilt-up buildings can be thrown up elsewhere to house them. There have been reports of them popping up anew not only in such Southeast Asian nations as Timor and the Pacific islands but as far away as the United Arab Emirates and Turkiye, among others.
“As a growing number of governments intensify their efforts against cyber-enabled fraud and scam centers in the region, organized crime has responded by hedging both within and beyond it,” according to an April report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “It is now increasingly clear that a potentially irreversible spillover has taken place in Southeast Asia, leaving criminal groups free to pick, choose, and move jurisdictions, operations, and value as needed, with the resulting situation rapidly outpacing the capacity of governments to contain it.”