Award-winning Filipina journalist Eunice Barbara Novio, now based in Thailand, says the sprawling network of fraud compounds currently operating across Southeast Asia — most notoriously in Myanmar — has its roots in the Philippines, where Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs, state-licensed online gambling firms) took hold from 2016 in towns such as Bamban, north of Manila. POGOs were banned in late 2024, and in November 2025 a Philippine court sentenced former Bamban mayor Alice Guo to life in prison for qualified human trafficking after finding she had forced hundreds of people to run scams under threat of mistreatment and torture. Novio, who has reported extensively on Filipino victims trafficked to Myanmar's so-called scam cities near the Thai border, warns that thousands of Filipinos remain trapped in those compounds as criminal networks relocate operations further inland to evade authorities.