A cargo consolidator — one of dozens licensed to bundle the lovingly packed boxes that overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) send home to their families — has apparently been running the oldest trick in the freight forwarding playbook: collect the fees, accept the boxes, then quietly let the shipments rot on the pier.

Nosy Tarsee said tens of thousands of boxes from OFWs across the globe sat inside more than 140-foot containers at multiple major ports, unprocessed and unclaimed, while the company that was supposed to shepherd them home did nothing.

When regulators finally issued a formal order requiring the company to explain itself and settle outstanding duties and charges, the company allegedly went silent.

By the time authorities moved to revoke its license, investigators had discovered something telling: several of the company’s registered business and warehouse addresses were ghost locations, non-operational facades on paper.

At the same time, the operation continued to accept new shipments elsewhere. Foreign consolidators, it turned out, had never been properly disclosed to regulators. The right hand, it seems, was never meant to know what the left was doing.

The people who suffered most, as always, were the ones who could least afford it — the OFWs who scrimped and saved to fill those boxes and their families back home who waited by the door.

This is not a novel scheme. In the balikbayan box industry, consolidators sit on a pressure point: the sender abroad trusts them, the recipient at home waits on them, and regulators are an ocean away from either.

When a consolidator decides the fees are worth more than the follow-through, nobody finds out until the boxes stop arriving, and by then the paper trail has grown cold.

The government said it is tracking down recipients to deliver the remaining abandoned cargo. Whether that is enough comfort for the families who waited months for a piece of their loved ones is another question entirely.