PAOCC, BI uncover extortion of former POGO workers’ families

February 7, 2025 | 12:00am

MANILA, Philippines — Police raided a travel agency accused of extorting relatives of former Philippine offshore gaming operator (POGO) workers and releasing fake government documents to foreigners.

Two employees of JRB Travel and Consultancy Services Inc., located in Intramuros, Manila, were nabbed on Tuesday during a joint operation involving the Philippine National Police-Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC).

The suspects, identified as Rosalie Bolaños and Jaive Nobleta, posed as PAOCC officers.

Two complainants who approached PAOCC alleged they paid roughly P1 million to the travel firm to remove their husband and fiancé – who worked for POGOs – from the deportation list “through an underground process.”

The PAOCC uncovered that the travel firm provided government documents to foreign nationals, including birth certificates, marriage certificates, passports and driver’s licenses.

On Wednesday, the PAOCC and the Bureau of Immigration (BI) clarified that while these documents were genuinely issued by government agencies, they contain questionable identities.

“The picture is a foreign national but bearing a Filipino name,” PAOCC Director Gilberto Cruz said in a briefing.

“As far as the birth certificate and other documents, they are authentic because they came in by mail. They came from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) with a receipt,” he pointed out.

BI spokesperson Dana Sandoval said that the raided travel firm, established in 2021, had been blacklisted by the bureau in April 2024.

Bolaños, according to Sandoval, is facing fraud charges filed by a South Korean national for failing to secure his visa after he had already paid P3.2 million for it.

Cruz said the travel firm had victimized, among others, Chinese, Korean and Indian nationals.

The PAOCC director explained that it has marketed its services through social media platforms, commenting on various posts and enticing potential victims by showcasing fake success stories.

As for relatives of former POGO workers, Sandoval said the firm made false promises about saving their loved ones from deportation.

The scheme could be perpetrated by an all-Filipino large-scale syndicate in cahoots with some employees in various government agencies, Cruz said.

Cruz noted that this scheme could represent the “missing link” that senators referred to last year during their inquiry into how former Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo allegedly acquired Filipino citizenship despite being born in China.

Meanwhile, in six days, BI has deported 57 foreign POGO workers who were part of the 450 foreign nationals arrested in January. – Evelyn Macairan