Manila arrests 244 foreigners in two Mindanao gaming-site raids

Philippine authorities arrested 244 foreign nationals in two raids on Friday in Mindanao, the largest action this year against illegal offshore gaming sites, the Bureau of Immigration said in a statement released late on Saturday.

At the first address, officers took 110 Chinese nationals, two Cambodians and one Hong Kong resident. At the second, they took 131 more foreigners, mostly Chinese, with citizens of Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar among them. The two counts are 113 and 131, which is 244. The bureau said large quantities of computers, mobile phones, laptops and SIM cards were seized. It said the government is looking at human-trafficking claims and intends to deport those arrested.

Manila banned Philippine offshore gaming operators, known as POGOs, in 2024. The stated ground was that organised groups had used the licences as cover for trafficking, money laundering, online fraud, kidnapping and murder. Friday's raids are an enforcement action against sites that kept running after the ban, not a new policy. The bureau called it the biggest such crackdown of 2026.

What the two sites show

The nationality mix is the operational detail. A site staffed by 110 Chinese nationals plus a handful of others fits the pattern regional police have described since 2022: compounds recruited, or coerced, from mainland China and from poorer neighbours, running scam calls and investment fraud aimed at victims outside the Philippines. The second site's mix, Chinese plus Malaysian, Indonesian and Myanmar nationals, is the same pattern with a wider recruiting net. The bureau did not say how many of the 244 claim they were trafficked, how many were paid staff, or how many were armed. It said the trafficking allegation is under investigation.

A 2023 United Nations report estimated that hundreds of thousands of people had been trafficked into scam compounds across Southeast Asia. The Philippines figure inside that estimate was never a single audited number. Friday's 244 is an arrest count, not a revision of the regional total. It is evidence that, two years after the ban, compounds in Mindanao were still equipped and staffed.

Why Mindanao, and why now

The old POGO belt was Metro Manila and the industrial parks north of it, where towers were leased to licensed operators and then, in several documented cases, to unlicensed ones. A pair of raids in the south suggests the activity has moved to places with weaker local inspection, or that Manila's closures pushed operators down the archipelago. The bureau did not give the town names. It said military units took part alongside immigration officers, which is the marker the government uses when it wants a raid treated as a security operation rather than a labour inspection.

Deportation is the stated end of the process. The Philippines has deported large groups of Chinese nationals from gaming sites before, often after weeks in immigration detention. A group of 244 will test detention space and the pace of consular interviews. Beijing's embassy had not, in the Saturday statement, given a public count of nationals it accepts as its own. That count, when it comes, is the check on the bureau's "mostly Chinese" line.

The equipment list matters more than the headcount for what the sites were doing. Computers, phones, laptops and SIM cards, seized in large quantities at both addresses, are the tools of a call-floor fraud operation. They are not the chips and tables of a licensed casino. The 2024 ban was written against both. Friday's seizure shows which of the two was still running in Mindanao.

What the ban did not finish

The 2024 ban removed the licence. It did not remove the buildings, the fibre, or the recruiters. The policy question left open is whether two raids and a deportation order reduce the number of floors, or move the next floor to another island. The bureau's number for this week is 244 people and two addresses. It has not published a figure for sites still operating.