MANILA – A former Philippine mayor alleged to be a spy for China was convicted Thursday for human trafficking for her role in running a mega-scam center north of Manila.
Alice Guo, who last year was dismissed as mayor of Bamban town in Tarlac province, was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Two Filipino accomplices and five Chinese nationals were convicted with her.
“This eagerly awaited ruling is not only a legal victory but also a moral one,” the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission said in a statement on Guo’s conviction.
The court ruled that the sprawling 20-acre compound leased by Guo’s firm, known as Baofu, be forfeited on behalf of the government. Guo was one of the invited guests at a Senate hearing in May last year investigating scam centers in the country.
She had largely flown under the radar and only entered local politics in 2022, when she ran and won as mayor of Bamban, a small rural town in northern Tarlac province.
She subsequently leased the property to a Chinese company that allegedly ran online scams, which had grown and proliferated during the administration of ex-leader Rodrigo Duterte from 2016 to 2022.
Facing further Senate scrutiny, Guo escaped to Indonesia, where she was arrested last September and subsequently flown back to the Philippines.
“The court’s promulgation on November 20, 2025, makes clear that Guo’s power, wealth and public persona were built entirely on human trafficking, online scam operations and a fabricated identity,” the commission said.
The scale of Guo’s operations in Bamban only became known in March 2024 after a police raid on the compound, when the authorities were stunned to find 36 buildings inside a 10-hectare “mega scam” facility. Hundreds of foreign nationals, mostly Chinese, were rounded up and later deported.
“At the same time, investigators uncovered evidence of human trafficking, ‘pig-butchering’ scam schemes, Philippine Offshore Gaming Operations (POGOs) being used as a front for illegal operations, cryptocurrency fraud, money laundering and systematic exploitation,” it said.
POGO is another name for online casinos in the Philippines, which proliferated during Duterte’s presidency but were shuttered by 2022 with the political transition to Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Pig butchering refers to an online scam where a victim is duped into progressively contributing to financial schemes using cryptocurrency. The scams range from fake romantic relationships to investment fraud.
Marcos subsequently ordered a shutdown of all POGO operations in the country, which had attracted waves of customers from China, where gambling is illegal. Filipino senators who grilled Guo had alleged that she had ties to Chinese criminal syndicates and that she had faked her identity to acquire Filipino citizenship, which qualified her to contest local polls.
In June this year, the Manila Regional Trial Court Branch 34 separately ruled that Guo – whose legal Chinese name is Guo Hua Ping – had “illicitly assumed the identity of a Filipino to run for mayor of Bamban.” It also overturned Guo’s electoral victory, arguing that it was void from the start because she was not qualified to run in the first place since she was not a Filipino.
“The Alice Guo case is a story of a nation that refused to be deceived, of institutions that stood firm and of victims whose voices now echo through every courtroom decision,” the commission’s executive director, Benjamin Acorda Jr, said.
“It is proof that no matter how elaborate the scheme, how powerful the mastermind, or how long the deception, justice will find its way. And when it does, it does more than punish—it restores. No empire built on fraud and exploitation can endure when a nation stands united in truth.”
Jason Gutierrez was head of Philippine news at BenarNews, an online news service affiliated with Radio Free Asia (RFA), a Washington-based news organization that covered many under-reported countries in the region. A veteran foreign correspondent, he has also worked with The New York Times and Agence France-Presse (AFP).
