A court in the Philippines has sentenced a Chinese woman – who became a local mayor while masquerading as a Philippine citizen – and seven others to life in prison on human trafficking charges, a state prosecutor said.
Alice Guo, 35, who served as mayor of a town north of Manila, was found guilty on Thursday of running a Chinese-operated gambling centre where hundreds of people were conscripted to carry out online scams on members of the public.
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State prosecutor Olivia Torrevillas said that Guo – who was arrested in Indonesia in September 2024 after fleeing the Philippines – and seven other defendants would be jailed for life.
“After over just one year, the court … gave us a favourable decision. Alice (Guo) was convicted along with seven other co-accused. Life imprisonment,” Torrevillas said outside the regional court in Manila.
In March 2024, police raided the sprawling centre linked to Guo, which included office buildings, luxury villas and a large swimming pool, after a Vietnamese worker escaped and alerted police.
More than 700 Filipinos, Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysians, Taiwanese, Indonesians and Rwandans were found at the site, along with documents allegedly showing that Guo was president of a company that owned the compound.
A spokesperson for the Philippine Anti-Organised Crime Commission told reporters that Guo and three others had been convicted of “organising trafficking” inside the compound. Four others were found guilty of “acts of trafficking”, the spokesman said.
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Although Guo was elected mayor of Bamban town, the location of the scam centre raided by police, a Manila court ruled in June that, as a Chinese citizen, she was never eligible to run for the position in the first place.
“Her appointment and entire mayoral team were also declared void,” Philippine broadcaster ABS-CBN said in a report on Guo’s trial on Thursday.
ABS-CBN said that during inquiries into Guo’s activities, politicians alleged that she was “not a Filipino but a Chinese national who skirted Philippine civil registry, immigration and election laws as an asset of the Chinese government”.
The AFP news agency said the Chinese embassy in Manila did not immediately return calls seeking comment on Thursday.
Philippine Senator Risa Hontiveros said Guo’s conviction followed after a Senate investigation and was a “victory against corruption, human trafficking, cybercrime, and many other transnational crimes”.
“We will continue to demand accountability from every government agency that failed in their duties, and we will continue to investigate the full extent of Chinese intelligence operations in our country,” Hontiveros said.
“And to all those who enabled Alice Guo’s criminal empire: the Philippines is not a playground for exploitation, infiltration and espionage. Accountability is coming.”
The cyberscam industry has thrived in Southeast Asia in recent years, particularly in Cambodia, Myanmar and the Philippines, where thousands of scammers are estimated to be involved in the online fraud business.
According to a United Nations report, victims in the wider region were conned out of up to $37bn by online scammers in 2023.
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