POGO hubs at RCBC Plaza and Subic fall

Congratulations to the arresting teams at RCBC Plaza (the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission and the Philippine National Police-Criminal Investigation and Detection Group) and in Subic (the Armed Forces of the Philippines, National Bureau of Investigation, and Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority).

In a previous raid featured earlier in this StarGazer column entitled “POGO raid hints of DPAs at work,” https://tribune.net.ph/2025/03/17/pogo-raid-hints-of-dpas-at-work, no arrests were made because an insider tipped them off and the hub employees, including an estimated 600 foreigners, got away.

This time, the raids at RCBC Plaza and Subic were utterly successful with arrests. The key to successfully curtailing POGO hubs long term is in arrests, not just the confiscation of computers and equipment, which can easily be replaced if the hub is intact and can move to a new location. Arrests mean jail or deportation, and the death of the hub.

In the RCBC Plaza raid, about 200 Filipinos and foreigners (Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, Taiwanese, Brazilian and Hong Kong nationals) were arrested. The intel on the raid originated from the arrest of Dennis E. Esguerra, suspected of robbery, with the warrant issued by Judge Rico Sebastian.

In Subic, before the raid on Grande Island, the POGO operated under the guise of an array of legitimate private enterprises. The number of those arrested was not given, but included five key Chinese POGO VIPs — Ye Tianwu aka Qiu Feng, Xu Xining, Ye Xiaocan, Su Anlong, and He Peng, plus Cambodian Ang Deck/Dic, and Filipinos Melvin Mañosa Aguillon Jr. and Jeffrey Espiridion, employees of the Cambodian.

The evil of POGOs is exacerbated by its relation to other more serious crimes like espionage (a grand plan to siphon off on a massive and detailed scale intel data that is sent directly to a Chinese mainland firm — https://tribune.net.ph/2025/02/14/is-deepseek-an-espionage-tool), kidnapping, especially of children for the organ trade, prostitution, and cyber scams, as the raiding teams reported.

“Such activities, which may be part of larger criminal network operations, pose a serious threat to our national security,” the Subic raiding team pointed out.

The success of the authorities at RCBC Plaza and Grande Island in Subic demonstrated that they are beyond the grip of big-time corruption, which is peanuts to the POGO hubs, and that they are aware of the possibility that certain members of their teams are prone to big-time bribery, such as in the earlier raid in Makati where a DPA spilled the beans, which resulted in no arrests made.

It is important that the government creates a Master List of known DPAs and publishes it in media to isolate and blacklist these criminal bribery-prone elements once and for all.

Finally, on top of the multi-agency raiding teams, the government may want to consider setting up an overall POGO Task Force to render long term strategies, sustain the highly successful raids, and assist the raiding teams in terms of legal protocols, inter-agency teamwork and foreign technical assistance, such as cyber security protocols and relations with foreign cyber security agencies.

Let us continue and strengthen the job well done by our multi-agency raiding teams.