The mayor, the scam, and the spy accusations: Who is Alice Guo?

In early 2022, inhabitants of the remote Spanish city of Bamban, north of Manila, gathered for the gubernatorial campaign rally of a courageous young woman named Alice Leal Guo.

In anticipation of her appearance, supporters clapped in pale, their candidate’s preferred color.

Next came the low rumbling of a plane wheel, prompting cheers from the crowd. Guo flashed a smile and waving over to her followers while seated in the cockpit, wearing a pink top and a pilot’s helmet.

As the aircraft touched down, the audience broke into a song: “A-lice Guo! “A-lice Guo”

At 31, Guo’s sun was rising: with promises of generous subsidies and economic growth, all delivered in her personal brassy, cheerful tone, she had galvanised a following in the town which would see her became its first sexual mayor.

Some supporters of Guo, who had been cheering up for her, had had predicted that she would be imprisoned for human trafficking and alleged Chinese spying costs less than three years later.

Her death began with a police raid that identified a substance where a huge scam function was being run from just behind her company. But as the government delved deeper and Guo struggled to respond to fundamental inquiries about her past, a confusing problem emerged: Who really is Alice Guo?

Guo claims that she was a pig-farmer before taking over the family’s professional piggery. She claims she came to local politicians from the pig-farming industry.

The career change may have required strong pockets– and when lectured about her campaign finances little after, Guo said it was friends and acquaintances in the pig-farming business who had supported her municipal bid.

Guo, however, had links to a number of affluent Chinese businessmen. Little is known about them, but some have eventually been convicted of money-laundering, and then also face charges of human trafficking alongside Guo.

Her attractive personality was the focus of her plan. On stage at one occasion, Guo told her market:” For our group, rule number one is: Would no damage! No damage is tolerated; instead, we may simply spread the word of passion.

For bright platitudes may have a poison of irony, in fact, when authorities exposed the harm and suffering they alleged had been inflicted under Guo’s view. However, she brought the youthful, up-a-leaning energy of her campaign into Bamban Municipal Hall when she took office in June 2022, painting the building pink and adding flowers to the exterior of the structure.

Alice May Aban, 31, who owns a vegetable stall in the town, described her as “beautiful, kind, and helpful to other women.” She told the BBC that she had voted for Guo precisely because she was a woman, adding that as mayor, Guo had arranged cleaning jobs for women of the town.

According to conversations the BBC had with a number of residents of Bamban, Guo was widely regarded as a compassionate and sympathetic leader. Miah Mejia, the daughter of one of Alice’s political allies, claimed that she had given a free scholarship to every local household. Another interviewee claimed to have been given a cash subsidy for his college expenses but had not received a scholarship to attend college.

An emotional Francisco Flores, 75, said,” She’s helped a lot of poor people here in Bamban, giving medicines and the way she is with people, you’d never see a problem”.

He hailed the addition of a McDonald’s and a branch of the Philippine fast-food chain Jollibee during Guo’s tenure.

Online, pro-Guo social media accounts portrayed her as a progressive young mayor presiding over a pink-tinted wonderland of buffalo races, performances, and concerts.

A year-and-half into her mayoralty, however, this carefully crafted image began to crumble.

In February 2024, Philippine police received a report about a Vietnamese national who had escaped from the captivity of Zun Yuan Technology Incorporated, a company operating out of a walled compound in Bamban.

Police officers and soldiers gathered nearby on the night of March 12 to prepare for a raid on the site, which is located just a short walk from Guo’s office in the Municipal Hall.

One officer who was there, Marvin de la Paz of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission ( PAOCC), told the BBC that around midnight, police informants sent word that people were leaving the compound in buses.

Mr. de la Paz and his team immediately headed for the compound after they suspected that their raid plans had been leaked. On the way, they saw people fleeing in the other direction, and some officers in the convoy had to peel off and chase them down. One of the largest scam hubs ever discovered in the Philippines, which spanned almost 20 acres, was discovered when they arrived at the site, which had 36 buildings inside it.

” We were amazed”, Mr de la Paz said,” That was our first time seeing such a grandiose entrance]to a scam compound]… In this compound, you experience some “you’re small.”

It later emerged that the compound was built on land which Guo had previously owned – and that, as mayor, she had granted Zun Yuan a business permit. Her name also appeared on a utility bill located at the location.

Alice Guo’s lawyers did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Zun Yuan allegedly operated an online gambling and entertainment business that was licensed as a Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator ( PGO ) – a status that previously permitted such businesses to set up legally in the Philippines.

A relaxation in gambling regulations under ex-President Rodrigo Duterte in 2017 led to a surge of Pogo-driven business activity. However, many conglomerates discovered Pogo licenses useful for concealing their criminal activities, and PAOCC reported finding proof that Zun Yuan was engaged in “pig-butchering” operations from its compound office.

Pig-butchering is a con where scammers take time to build trust with victims by posing as lovers or prospective business partners, then trick them into investing their money into fraudulent schemes.

The BBC discovered training scripts on how to scam targets in a deserted employee dormitory after being shown around the compound by PAOCC officers earlier this month.

” I want to create my own financial empire”, a scripted character – a female crypto expert at an international bank- says to her target, before flattering him and encouraging him to share his dreams. She is instructed to put her target on hold while making up her mind to” cash in on a trade,” only to reveal moments later that she had killed herself. She then asks whether he himself knows how to trade, setting him up for the transfer of money that would soon follow.

One of the many ways that these substances swindle billions of dollars all over the world is this. Typically run by Chinese organised crime groups across South East Asia, they are staffed by a mixture of willing employees and trafficked victims who are forced to scam.

More than 300 foreign nationals were discovered in the Bamban compound, many of whom were working there against their will, according to de la Paz and his colleagues.

Punishments for disobedient or underperforming workers ranged from beatings to the banal: the BBC was shown a notebook from the compound, in which a worker had copied out the phrase,” I will meet my targets tomorrow”, hundreds of times in Chinese.

The workers ‘ area of the compound, which included a basketball court, a supermarket, and restaurants, was enclosed by walls made of barbed wire. Employees lived in rooms of six, each with a balcony equipped with a toilet and shower.

Their managers meanwhile resided in a separate gated community, according to de la Paz, who showed the BBC one of the villas there.

A marble-clad living room featured a high-end entertainment system, security monitor and ornate hardwood furniture. A staircase leading down to what appeared to be escape tunnels, which were now flooded with water, was located behind the house.

By the time security forces stormed the Bamban compound on the evening of 12 March 2024, some of these scam bosses had already eluded capture.

However, the raid signaled a change in the political climate.

In June 2022, just as Guo was being sworn in as mayor, Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential term had ended.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr., his immediate succeeding, started receiving requests for Pogo businesses to be banned. Many across Philippine society sounded the alarm about the criminality that often lurked within, despite the millions they brought in as revenue. Their biggest customers were wealthy Chinese, which raised questions about foreign influence because Marcos had courted Washington over Beijing, unlike his predecessor.

When the raid in Bamban happened, it exposed a dark underbelly of the Philippines– and the two worlds of Alice Guo – the pink office from where she had sought a political career and the scam compound, which suggested far murkier ambitions – collapsed in on one another.

Guo had been a relatively unknown name in the Philippines until last May when she was called to appear before the Senate to explain her links to the scam compound.

She quickly turned into a meme. When she told senators she had grown up on a family farm, it brought swift ridicule from Filipinos who said she was too glamorous for the countryside. She gained notoriety for her inconsistent, vague comments and assertions that she had forgotten fundamentals of her early life, which earned her the nickname “my amnesia girl” on social media.

Guo said she’d had a secluded childhood as the child of a Chinese father and Filipino mother– but could not remember where in the Philippines her family home had been.

A senator once remarked to her,” Please mayor, a little more candor than you have shown so far in answering some of the important questions.”

She told sceptical senators that she had sold her stake in the land before becoming mayor, and that the issuance of a business permit to Zun Yuan had been a mere administrative measure.

When a court in Singapore found two of Guo’s former Chinese business partners guilty of money-laundering during the hearings, suspicion grew.

Then, in July, Guo managed to escape to Indonesia and break through the travel restrictions that were imposed on her despite the high public interest in her case. A few months later, she was re-arrested and returned to the Philippines.

Additionally, in July, Philippine investigators made a breakthrough. Guo’s fingerprints were found to match those on file for a girl from China named Guo Hua Ping, who had arrived in the Philippines alongside her mother, also Chinese, in the early 2000s.

Another area of inquiry led to this revelation in the Senate: the possibility that Guo may be a spy, withholding information from the Chinese government, or gathering intelligence. The idea spread quickly among the watching public, dominating public discussion of the case.

The possibility that Guo was a spy warranted an investigation, according to Jaye Bekema, a senior officer on the staff of Risa Hontiveros, one of the senators who investigated potential links between scam syndicates and Chinese intelligence.

” I think there should be some clarity as to what a spy means”, Ms Bekema said, while stressing that there is no conclusive proof of Guo being a spy.

” I’m more likely to believe that she was hired by the Chinese government because of her connections to crime and influence on local politics and the local government,” she said.

In many ways, Guo had become a victim of her own success. When China-Philippines relations deteriorated under Marcos, she was fully exposed to public scrutiny for the career she chose and the limelight she worked hard to attract.

As political rhetoric escalated and tensions between the two countries spiralled, not least of all in the South China Sea, the young mayor found herself in the crosshairs of espionage accusations.

Others, however, are more skeptical about the claim. The Chinese state and Guo would have made strange bedfellows, according to Teresita Ang See, a civic leader in the Chinese-Filipino community.

What can she scouts in a place like [Bamban]? It’s in central Luzon, it’s not near any of the sensitive establishments. Why should I use her? She’s very visible, she flaunts her lifestyle. Alice Guo, a person like you, would be the last one you would use as a spy, according to Ang See.

However, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, one of the panelists who conducted the questioning against Guo, claims that the situation is more complicated.

” Transnational criminals working around the region know how to tap into… He explains that it’s possible for local talent to enter our society through politics or business. Either way, Guo’s case shed light on the Philippine state’s vulnerability to being corrupted and co-opted by criminal groups abusing Pogo licences.

President Marcos imposed a blanket ban on all Pogos in the middle of 2024, citing organized crime’s widespread abuse of them.

Gatchalian says that the investigation into Alice Guo helped drive this change.

Because of it, there was a ferocious clamor for a ban, he tells the BBC. ” And that’s when the president officially banned Pogos”.

Philippine police have since searched numerous scam-heavy locations across the nation. But given how influential the syndicates have become, there are concerns that leaks within the security forces and government institutions are allowing criminals to evade capture, according to Mr de la Paz.

While Ang See claims that serving police officers have been discovered working for the criminal syndicates, Ms. Bekema claims she is certain that some candidates for the upcoming national elections are still being funded by Pogo money.

In Bamban, concerns about state infiltration seem far from people’s minds.

For the upcoming municipal elections, brightly colored campaign posters are decked out on the streets. The Municipal Hall has been whitewashed, and the flowers have been removed.

Guo has been prohibited from running for office once more and is currently on trial in six separate cases, where he could face decades in prison. She has pleaded not guilty to human trafficking charges.

Yet many people still treasure the memories of their troubled former mayor.

One of those currently standing for Bamban councillor is Miah Mejia’s father, Fortunato, a garrulous 69-year-old, who also ran in 2022 as a member of Alice’s party, although he lost. He even made an appearance in one of her publicity videos at the time.

He says that the people of Bamban had taken a chance by electing Guo, but that she had good connections to Chinese investors and had delivered on all her promises to the townspeople.

Additionally, he is unfavorable to the Senate’s assertion that Guo was not a Filipino.

” That’s what they’ve been showing, but we still don’t believe it because we don’t care whether she’s Filipino or not”, he says. It’s important whether or not she assists us.

Mr Mejia is adamant that the Alice Guo he knew would not have been involved in human trafficking.

He blatantly says,” Never, ever would she do that,” adding that he never would. ” I know she has a heart. She feigns the Lord.

Who is Alice Guo? Listen to the radio documentary on Assignment here

Additional reporting by Harry Atteshlis and Jay Behrouzi