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EVERYTHING MUST GO: NO LETUP IN WAR ON SE ASIA ‘POGO’ SCAMS www.businessmirror.com.ph
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Sunday, April 26, 2026 Vol. 21 No. 194
Seizure of 6,500‑member recruitment channel coincides with UN‑backed Philippine crackdown on POGO‑linked fraud
P25.00 nationwide | 4 sections 20 pages | 7 DAYS A WEEK
Rerouted US imports avoiding Trump tariffs top $300 billion
By Laura Curtis Bloomberg
A
EQUIPMENT confiscated in a raid by Cambodian police are laid out on a table at a scam center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Wednesday, March 11, 2026. AP/HENG SINITH
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By Malou Talosig-Bartolome
NITED States law enforcement agencies have launched a sweeping regional offensive against Southeast Asia’s multibillion‑dollar cyber‑fraud industry, seizing a major Telegram recruitment channel that targeted Filipino workers under the guise of “POGO” job postings. The seizure of the “POGO JOB HIRING 2023!!!!” chan‑ nel, which had more than 6,500 members, came as the Philippine Anti‑Organized Crime Commis‑ sion (PAOCC) adopted new United Nations‑backed prosecutorial pro‑ tocols to overhaul how scam hubs are dismantled and prosecuted. In Manila, PAOCC’s new stan‑ dard operating procedures—rolled out on April 22 with support from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)—aim to address a criti‑ cal legal hurdle. Previously, authorities had only a 36‑hour window to file com‑ plex cybercrime charges after raid‑ ing a compound. “How do you prove a cyber‑ crime in 36 hours? It is not pos‑ sible; we were scrambling,” a for‑ mer PAOCC operations director explained. “We had to improvise and ended up bringing charges of human trafficking—that is a lot easier to prove when you find hun‑ dreds of foreign nationals trapped in the compound.” The new protocols standardize
A job post on the Telegram channel. SCREENSHOT CREDIT: US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
The Telegram channel titled “POGO Job Hiring 2023!!!! was used to recruit individuals to work in Cambodia. SCREENSHOT CREDIT: US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Executive Secretary Ralph G. Recto: “Whatever revenues POGOs claimed to generate could never justify the lawlessness, exploitation, and social decay they left behind.”
victim repatriation, evidence col‑ lection, custody of perpetrators, and asset recovery. PAOCC Executive Director Benjamin C. Acorda said the re‑ forms reflect a collective resolve to “reinforce our national framework in addressing organized and trans‑ national crime.” PAOCC has freed 5,949 people from scam compounds, including 3,483 foreigners. A total of 218 perpetrators are currently await‑ ing trial. Executive Secretary Ralph G. Recto, who recommended the 2024 POGO ban during his ten‑
ure as Finance Secretary, empha‑ sized the economic reality of the crackdown: “Whatever revenues POGOs claimed to generate could never justify the lawlessness, ex‑ ploitation, and social decay they left behind.”
The ‘POGO’ Telegram seizure
THE adoption of these new Philip‑ pine prosecutorial protocols came as the newly formed US Scam Center Strike Force executed a first-of-itskind seizure of a highly organized Telegram recruitment network. The recruitment syndicate heavily targeted the Philippine la‑ bor pool and utilized local industry terms to mask its operations. The main channel, boasting over 6,500 members, operated un‑ der the name “POGO JOB HIRING 2023!!!!”
Evidence recovered from the seized channel revealed job post‑ ings that actively funnelled vic‑ tims into both localized hubs and overseas forced labor camps: • Overseas Deployment: Post‑ ings for “Urgent Hiring in Cambo‑ dia” explicitly listed the Philippines among its target nationalities. The syndicates specifically sought workers with “American” accents to work night shifts—aligning precisely with US daytime hours for cold-calling operations. • Local Hubs: Parallel job post‑ ings recruited female “Dealers” for localized operations in the Cagayan Valley, offering salaries between P30,000 and P50,000. These posts included strict, dis‑ criminatory physical require‑ ments, such as height minimums and the absence of visible tattoos or braces.
BOUT $300 billion worth of goods subject to Trump administra‑ tion tariffs are avoiding the levies annually and reaching the US from Southeast Asia and Mexico, exposing enforce‑ ment vulnerabilities just as a review of the North American trade deal is set to begin. US imports from China plummeted last year as Presi‑ dent Donald Trump ramped up tariffs. But shipment-level records analyzed by AI-driven supply chain platform Altana show that as new duties were imposed and adjusted, busi‑ nesses often routed goods through Asian countries with lower tariff rates, and onto Mexico, where treatment un‑ der the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement offered another opportunity for savings. Transshipment isn’t nec‑ essarily illegal in a global trad‑ ing system where production and assembly often span mul‑ tiple economies and as compa‑ nies ship goods through major ports to transfer cargo from one vessel to another. Component parts from China are increasingly used
to make new products in Viet‑ namese factories, for example, that are later shipped to the US. USMCA-related routes aren’t new, either. “Millions of USMCAbound shipments containing goods with travel consistent with rerouting and tariff cir‑ cumvention have been regis‑ tered since the agreement was ratified in 2020,” New Yorkbased Altana said in a report released Thursday. Altana, whose technology is used by the US Customs and Border Protection agency for trade enforcement, estimates that suspect transactions in the first 10 months of 2025 surged 76% compared with the same period in 2024, from just over 100 million transac‑ tions to 188.5 million. But the increase in suspi‑ cious shipments raises ques‑ tions about whether goods al‑ lowed into the US underwent any required changes at each stop in their journey to actu‑ ally qualify for preferential treatment under the USMCA. The issue hinges on com‑ plex “rules of origin” that gov‑ ern which country — and tar‑ iff rate — apply to a shipment of goods. In order to qualify as Continued on A2
The fraud scheme: Impersonating authorities
ONCE lured to the scam com‑ pound—located in rural Cambo‑ dia near the Thai border—recruit‑ ed workers were held against their Continued on A2
PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 60.4650 n JAPAN 0.3788 n UK 81.4524 n HK 7.7204 n CHINA 8.8495 n SINGAPORE 47.3196 n AUSTRALIA 43.1176 n EU 70.6594 n KOREA 0.0409 n SAUDI ARABIA 16.1214 Source: BSP (April 24, 2026)