(AsiaGameHub) – Government authorities in the Philippines have announced that the country has now fully eliminated all remaining traces of offshore gaming operations, which are widely known as POGOs.
Prior to July 2024, online gaming operators were permitted to set up their headquarters in the Philippines while serving customers based in overseas markets such as China.
However, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr reversed this policy during his 2024 State of the Nation Address, announcing that he would ban POGO operations entirely due to their deep ties to a range of criminal activities.
He explained that POGOs had “expanded into illegal activities far beyond gaming, including financial scams, money laundering, prostitution, human trafficking, kidnapping, brutal torture and even murder”, and a deadline of the end of 2024 was set for all such operations to cease operations permanently.
Justice Secretary Fredderick Vida told The Manila Times on Monday (April 6) that “there are no official POGOs left operating in the country, and no unauthorised illegal POGOs either”, confirming that the government’s sector-wide crackdown has been completed successfully.
The close of the POGO era
POGO operations first began emerging in 2003, after the Philippines offered a base to Chinese gaming operators that were displaced by the Chinese government’s full ban on all gambling in Mainland China.
The sector saw rapid growth starting in 2016, after the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) began issuing operating licenses to POGO providers. At its peak in 2019, the Philippines’ POGO industry counted more than 300 licensed operators, contributed over P100bn (£1.25bn) in tax revenue to the national government, and employed tens of thousands of local Filipino workers.
However, as POGOs grew in scale, widespread concerns over linked criminal activity continued to build, leading to repeated calls for a full ban on the sector, demands that President Marcos Jr ultimately answered.
One of the most high-profile criminal cases connected to POGOs involved Alice Guo, a Chinese national who was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 2025 on human trafficking charges. The charges followed a 2024 raid on a POGO operation located on land Guo owned in the town of Bamban.
Police found more than 700 Filipino and foreign nationals at the site, many of whom reported they had been forced to participate in online scam operations. Further investigations also uncovered that Guo had faked her Filipino citizenship to win election as Mayor of Bamban.
A statement from the Presidential Anti-Organised Crime Commission (PAOCC) released after the guilty verdict said: “Guo’s power, wealth and public image were built entirely on human trafficking, online scam operations and a falsified identity.”
“This long-awaited ruling is not only a legal victory but also a moral one. It delivers justice to victims, reaffirms the government’s unified stance against organised crime and marks a defining moment in the country’s fight against large-scale trafficking and online scam syndicates.”
A new chapter for the Philippine gaming market
One year after the official end of POGO operations, the PAOCC is still prosecuting cases linked to members of dismantled POGO networks, which highlights how deeply criminality was embedded throughout these operations.
Gambling remains a key economic driver for the Philippine economy, but regulated online gaming is now limited to domestic inland operators (PIGOs) and is overseen by PAGCOR.
In 2025, online gaming activity generated P53.3bn (£667.9m) in revenue for PAGCOR. Even so, the regulator recorded an overall 5% drop in total revenue, partially caused by the offshore gaming ban, as the now-banned sector contributed almost P3bn (£37.6m) in revenue in 2024.
Following the government’s crackdown on POGOs, policy focus has now shifted to strengthening oversight of the regulated gaming industry, as well as cracking down on the country’s unregulated gambling black market.
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