Alice Guo, Chinese national who ran huge scam centre while Philippines mayor, sentenced to life in prison | Philippines
Alice Guo, a Chinese citizen who became a mayor in the Philippines by posing as a Filipino, was sentenced to life in prison along with seven others on human trafficking charges, prosecutors said.
Guo, who served as mayor of a town north of Manila, was convicted of running a Chinese-run online gambling center where hundreds of people were forced to commit fraud or risk torture.
The vast complex, which includes office buildings, luxury villas and a large swimming pool, was raided in March 2024 after a Vietnamese worker escaped and called the police.
More than 700 Filipinos, Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysians, Taiwanese, Indonesians and Rwandans were found at the site, and documents purportedly showing Guo as the president of a company that owned the compound.
All eight defendants, some of whom are foreign nationals, were sentenced to life imprisonment, prosecutor Olivia Torrevillas said outside the regional courthouse in Manila.
“After just over a year, the court… gave us a positive decision. Alice [Guo] He was found guilty along with seven other defendants. Life imprisonment,” Torrevillas said, declining to name Guo’s other defendants due to privacy laws.
Guo and three others were convicted of “organizing human trafficking” within the compound, a spokesman for the Philippine Organized Crime Commission told reporters in a group chat.
Four more people were found guilty of “smuggling acts”, the spokesman said.
Guo, 35, was arrested by Indonesian police in September 2024 after fleeing the Philippines.
Although he was elected mayor of the town of Bamban, where the fraud center was located, a court in Manila ruled in June that Guo was in no way fit for the post as a Chinese citizen.
The Chinese embassy did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment on Thursday.
The transnational fraud industry has boomed in Southeast Asia in recent years, and thousands of fraudsters are estimated to be involved. Victims in the wider region are deprived of up to $37 billion in 2023, according to a UN report that says global losses are likely “much greater”.
Centers flourished in the Philippines under then-president Rodrigo Duterte, after the government regulator was given the right to issue business licenses nationwide.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced a ban on offshore gambling operations and ordered foreign nationals to work at sites outside the country in 2024, amid growing public outrage over the Guo case.
