A Philippine court on Thursday sentenced Alice Guo, a Chinese national who posed as a Filipina and served as a town mayor, along with seven others, to life imprisonment on human trafficking charges, according to state prosecutors.
Guo, who held the mayoral post in a town north of Manila, was found guilty of running a Chinese-operated online gambling centre where hundreds of people were coerced into participating in scams under the threat of torture.
The sprawling complex, which included office buildings, luxury villas, and a large swimming pool, was raided in March 2024 after a Vietnamese worker escaped and alerted authorities. More than 700 individuals from the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Rwanda were discovered on site, along with documents showing Guo as president of the company that owned the facility.
State prosecutor Olivia Torrevillas confirmed outside a regional courthouse in Manila that all eight defendants, some foreign nationals, had been sentenced to life in prison. “After just over one year, the court gave us a favourable decision. Alice (Guo) was convicted along with seven co-accused,” she said, declining to name the others due to confidentiality laws.
A spokesman for the Philippine Anti-Organized Crime Commission added that Guo and three co-defendants were convicted of “organising trafficking” within the compound, while the remaining four were found guilty of “acts of trafficking.”
Guo, 35, had fled the Philippines and was arrested by Indonesian authorities in September 2024. Despite her election as mayor of Bamban town, a Manila court ruled in June that she was never eligible for the position as a Chinese citizen.
The Chinese embassy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The transnational scam industry in Southeast Asia has grown rapidly in recent years, with UN estimates suggesting that victims across the region lost up to $37 billion in 2023. The operations flourished in the Philippines under former President Rodrigo Duterte, who had granted nationwide operating licences for such gambling centres.
Following public outrage over the Guo case, President Ferdinand Marcos announced a ban on offshore gambling operations in 2024 and ordered foreign nationals working at such sites to leave the country.
