Philippines' Pogo Ban Faces Test as Underground Operations Persist

Last Friday, authorities in Zamboanga Sibugay arrested 244 foreigners—most of them Chinese—in what officials are calling the largest offshore gaming bust of the year. The operation unfolded across two barangays: Kimos in Siay and Tandiong Muslim in Alicia. At the Siay site, immigration officers detained 113 foreign nationals, including 110 Chinese, two Cambodians, and one Hong Kong resident. The Alicia operation yielded another 131 arrests, predominantly Chinese but also including nationals from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Myanmar. The raid recovered 78 computer monitors, roughly 3,000 mobile phones, laptops, cellular SIM cards, and other technical equipment suspected of powering online fraud schemes.

The bust arrives as a stark reminder of a problem the Philippine government declared solved more than two years ago. In July 2024, President Ferdinand Marcos stood before Congress and announced a total prohibition on Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators—Pogos—condemning them for the "grave abuse and disrespect to our system and laws" they had fostered. He ordered the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., the nation's gaming regulator, to wind down all operations by year's end. That executive declaration became formal law when Marcos signed Executive Order No. 74 in November 2024, banning offshore and internet gaming outright. The following year, Congress moved to make the prohibition permanent. Republic Act No. 12312, signed into law on October 23, 2025, and published five days later, criminalized the entire industry. The new statute repealed the 2021 law that had taxed and authorized Pogo operations under former President Rodrigo Duterte. It also canceled all work permits and visas held by anyone involved in offshore gaming, whether as operator, content provider, or service contractor.

The legislative push came from two senators who had grown convinced that half-measures would not suffice. Senator Risa Hontiveros, who chairs the Senate committee on women, children, family relations, and gender equality, spoke of minors forced into prostitution to service Chinese Pogo workers and the sprawling scam networks connected to former Mayor Alice Guo. Senator Sherwin Gatchalian framed the issue in starker terms: Pogos had brought nothing but a cascade of kidnapping, human trafficking, and prostitution. This was not merely an economic question, he argued, but a moral one.

Yet the law's passage did not erase the problem—it merely drove it underground. Most licensed Pogo companies shuttered their operations after the ban took effect. Others simply vanished into the shadows, rebranding themselves as online scam operations or continuing their work in clandestine compounds. The Zamboanga Sibugay complex appears to be one such transformation. The arrested foreigners were not only undocumented but illegally employed. The company itself now faces potential charges related to human trafficking and other serious crimes. If authorities are labeling this the year's largest bust, the implication cuts both ways: the operation was massive enough to warrant that designation, and many more remain undetected, fragmented into smaller cells that continue to damage the communities where they take root.

The presence of so many undocumented Chinese nationals raises questions that extend beyond gaming and fraud into national security. Since the Duterte administration first opened the door to Pogos, Chinese workers have constituted the largest contingent of foreign nationals entering the country for these operations. An indeterminate number of them now move through the Philippines without legal status, recruited by criminal syndicates whose reach and apparent immunity suggest something more than mere law enforcement failure. The scale and brazenness of the Zamboanga Sibugay operation—employing hundreds, generating substantial economic presence in its locality, operating long enough to become a known fixture before authorities moved in—raises an uncomfortable question: are corrupt officials providing shelter and support to these networks?

The laws exist. The ban is written into statute. What remains uncertain is whether the government possesses the will and capacity to enforce it. Criminal syndicates continue to view the Philippines as territory where laws bend, where operations can flourish in plain sight, where a crackdown is merely an interruption rather than a genuine threat. Until enforcement becomes as serious as the legislation, the Pogo industry will simply resurface under new names, in new locations, inflicting the same harms on the same vulnerable populations.