’Twas good (for some) while it lasted, but Pogo has left behind a big mess

A FEW days ago, TV news reported the case of a young Chinese actor who was lured into going to Thailand for a casting session and was abducted by thugs working for a syndicate of cyber scammers based in Myanmar. For months, he was forced to work in horrible conditions, his good looks and voice used to hook innocent victims.

Hard to imagine what his fate would have been had he not been able to send one urgent “SOS” text to his girlfriend, who promptly alerted Thai police. The cops worked for months to find him, and he was finally rescued in Myanmar. The footage showed a handsome, wholesome-looking young man when he was known as an actor in China; and later, when he was rescued—his head shaved, his face considerably aged from an ordeal that no one deserves.

His case jolts Filipinos’ memory of the nightmare that they all must continue to deal with, nearly two weeks after President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s blanket ban on Pogo (Philippine Online Gaming Operators) enterprises took effect at the end of 2024.

The ban takes effect nearly five years since the Pogo sector started peaking in the country. During the presidency of Rodrigo Roa Duterte, the doors to Pogos suddenly opened wide, allowing in a surge of foreign, mostly Chinese-funded, operations. Among those whose role in funding the Pogo networks is being investigated by the state agencies tasked to sort out the Pogo mess is Duterte’s former special economic adviser, the Davao-based businessman Michael Yang. He was the same Michael Yang who appeared twice online, and then, repeatedly snubbed subsequent hearings of the Senate Blue Ribbon committee, then chaired by Sen. Richard J. Gordon. The senator, in all, led over two dozen hearings into the case of Pharmally, the low-capital trading firm into which the discredited Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM-PS) funneled nearly P12 billion of the P40-billion Department of Health budget for pandemic supplies and services.  Gordon insisted Michael Yang was among Pharmally’s enablers.

Yang’s name recently resurfaced in the Pogo mess cleanup after his brother Tony, described as the “operator” in the family, was arrested by authorities for fraud, misrepresenting himself as a Filipino with fake identity documents. Deputy Minority Leader Risa Hontiveros, who had actively grilled witnesses during the Gordon-led Pharmally hearings, sought to link the illegal Pogo activities to Pharmally, describing the shadowy business operations as “we are one happy Pharmally.”

The Yang brothers’ capers are but a part of the humongous mess exposed in the aftermath of the Pogo cleanup, however.

During the nearly three years of investigations in the Senate—and parallel actions by the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force, the National Bureau of Investigation, and other units under the Department of Justice—the full extent of the harm caused by the poorly regulated Pogo activities is only now being redressed.  Many of the details unearthed—how Pogo entities have been used for cover for human trafficking, cyber scams, money laundering, and even drugs, if some probers are correct—would have stayed untouched if the presidential ban announced in July 2024 had not lifted the lid on the vast network of enablers in and out of government.

Cleaning up the mess continues:

1) The Commission on Elections is seeking reforms to allow it to fill the gaps in the election system that allowed an Alice Guo, a Chinese national whose “Filipino” birth certificate was cancelled by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), to become mayor of Bamban, Tarlac;

2) The Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) is investigating how Philippine banks could have turned an apparent blind eye to the flow of billions of pesos lodged by foreign “investors” with the help of Filipino partners, notably the P6 billion that was poured into the huge, 38-building enclave for Pogo operations in Bamban.

3) The AMLC, the DOJ, the NBI, with the help of some local authorities, are chasing after the assets used for illegal Pogo activities.  Senators Sherwin Gatchalian  and Hontiveros, and Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel III want government to use part of the seized assets to compensate  the victims of Pogo-related crimes, especially  those who were trafficked and suffered illegal detention, torture, sexual and other forms of abuse.

4) The Philippine Statistics Authority is still reeling from the Pogo scandal, which showed hundreds of foreign nationals able to secure birth certificates from some local registries, and then used these to secure vital Philippine documents like passports and the National ID.

5) The DOJ, through the Bureau of Immigration, is tracking down over 10,000 aliens who  worked with Pogo entities but failed to report to authorities, as directed,  after the Pogo ban was imposed.

Dozens of court cases are now pending in various courts, lodged by the government agencies tasked to run after all those who used the Pogo networks to carry out illicit activities, including human trafficking and cyber scams that are apparently victimizing not just Filipinos, but other nationalities as well in Asia, as the case of the Chinese actor rescued in Myanmar  shows.

Law-enforcement agencies, meanwhile, are also tracking illegal Pogo operations that have simply    gone underground—as the state regulator Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor) had warned—and are now taking over underutilized, cash-hungry real estate outside Metro Manila.

Beyond the criminal aspects of the Pogo mess, there’s the economic fallout. The property sector, which accounts for a sizeable chunk of the equities trading market, is also dealing with the impact of thousands of Pogo-related workers and executives who rented or bought condo units, entire compounds or buildings, and which were unable to transition to other operations.

Then, there’s the fallout from the loss of an estimated 40,000 jobs. That was the second major concern of President Marcos, as seen in his directive to the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), during his July 23 State of the Nation Address, to ensure that Filipino workers displaced by the ban are assisted in finding new jobs or transitioning to other IT-enabled enterprises.

To be sure, the initiative to clean up after the Pogo mess will take years. As did the years-long investigations conducted both in and out of Congress. Repairing damaged institutions; reforming and overhauling systems and procedures to make them fraud-proof; making the guilty accountable, all these will take time. But the most important decisions have been made, and, obviously, there’s no turning back.

Image credits: ROY DOMINGO, NONIE REYES, NONIE REYES