BAMBAN, Tarlac — Going around this sleepy town in the Central Luzon's Tarlac province, the name Alice Leal Guo would trigger things like the banned Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs), dating scams and cybercrimes and even Chinese espionage.

But people also remember the dismissed Bamban mayor flaunting her beauty and charm—enough to earn the town folks votes and have herself elected as local chief executive of the municipality.

It was in early 2022 that residents of the rural town gathered for the mayoral campaign rally of the plucky young Alice Guo. There were hundreds of supporters dressed in pink—their candidate's favourite colour—chattering in anticipation of her arrival.

Then came the low thudding of a helicopter rotor, prompting cheers from the crowd. Sitting in the cockpit, Guo—wearing a pink shirt and a pilot's headset—flashed a smile, waving down at her supporters.
As the helicopter touched down, the crowd broke into a chant: "A-lice Guo! A-lice Guo!"

Then aged 31, Guo's star was rising. Her promises of generous subsidies and economic development, all delivered in her signature brassy, upbeat tone, had galvanized a following in the town which would see her become its first female mayor.

But only a few of those cheering could never have predicted that in less than three years after being elected as mayor, Guo would be behind bars, facing charges of human trafficking and allegations that she was a Chinese spy.

Guo's downfall began with a police raid that uncovered a compound where a giant scam operation was being run from just behind her office. But as the authorities delved deeper, and the pretty town mayor struggled to answer basic queries about her past, a perplexing question emerged—who really is Alice Guo?
Getting hold of an old leaflet from Alice Guo's election campaign, it showed a composite image with the Bamban municipality building in the background. Here was the lady mayor everyone seemed to love.

According to Guo in several interviews, she came to local politics because of her interest to serve and help the needy. She had been successful in the pig-farming business, having managed her family's commercial piggery for several years, and since her career change to public service would have required deep pockets—and when quizzed about her campaign finances much later—she clarified that it was friends and acquaintances in the pig-farming business who had supported her mayoral bid.

Besides this, the pretty-faced Guo also had connections to a number of wealthy Chinese businessmen, though very little is known about them, but some have subsequently been convicted of money-laundering and now also face charges of human trafficking alongside Guo.

Guo's campaign then focused on her sunny persona and on stage during campaign rallies, she often told her audience: "For our team, rule number one is 'Do no harm! No harm is allowed. We should just spread love, love, love!'"

Such cheerful banality carrief a taint of irony, in retrospect, when authorities exposed the harm and suffering they alleged had been inflicted under Guo's Watch as mayor. Still, upon taking office in June 2022, she brought the youthful, bright-eyed energy of her campaign into the Bamban municipal hall, painting it pink and decorating the outside of the building with flowers.

"Alice was beautiful, she was kind and she was helpful to other women," the former Bamban mayor was described by vegetable vendor Priscilla May Aban, 31.

Aban enthused 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.

The fact is that Guo was widely regarded as a caring and empathetic leader, judging by conversations with several residents of Bamban. 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 told us he hadn't received a college scholarship but had been given a cash subsidy for his school fees.

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."

Online, pro-Guo social media accounts portrayed her as a progressive young mayor presiding over a pink-tinted wonderland of parades, buffalo races and concerts. A year-and-half into her mayoralty, however, this carefully crafted image began to crumble.

In February 2024, Philippine authorities 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. On the evening of March 12, police officers and soldiers gathered nearby to plan a raid on the site, located just a minute's walk from Guo's office in the municipal hall.

In news reports, one officer who was there, Marvin De La Paz of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC), narrated that at around midnight, police informants sent word that people were leaving the compound in buses.

Suspecting that their plans for a raid had been leaked, De La Paz and his colleagues raced straight for the compound. 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. When they arrived at the site, they found one of the largest scam hubs ever uncovered in the Philippines, containing 36 buildings and spanning almost 20 acres.

"We were amazed," the PAOCC officer reacted after the raid. "That was our first time seeing such a grandiose entrance (to a scam compound) . . . Somehow you feel like you're small in this compound."

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 an electricity bill found at the site.

In the raid, the authorities found a long, low building faced in white panels and dark blue coloured glass. It had multiple floors and featured an arcade of businesses on ground level. An archway was driven through the center of the building, resting on two large pillars. The compound's largest building featured a liquor store, teahouse and nightclub.

Zun Yuan, the company operating the site was purportedly an online gambling and entertainment company, which held a Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator (POGO) license from the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCor).

To explain, a relaxation in gambling regulations under ex-President Rodrigo Duterte in 2017 led to a surge of POGO-driven business activity. But many scam syndicates also found POGO licenses useful for masking their criminal operations—and PAOCC found evidence that Zun Yuan was running 'pig-butchering' scams from its office in the compound.

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.
This is just one of the many ways in which these compounds swindle billions of dollars around the world. 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.

Not all of the employees, though, were willing workers and participant in illegal activities, so punishments for disobedience or underperformance ranged from beatings to the banal.

Going back to Alice Guo, the raid signalled a shift in the political climate and in June 2022, just as she was being sworn in as mayor, Rodrigo Duterte's presidential term at the same time ended. His successor, Ferdinand 'Bongbong' Marcos Jr. soon began facing calls for a ban on POGO BUSINESSES and many across Philippine society sounded the alarm about the criminality that often lurked within, despite the millions they brought in as revenue.

So 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. Almost overnight, she became 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 became notorious for her inconsistent, vague comments, as well as her claims to have forgotten basic details of her early life, leading social media to nickname her 'my amnesia girl'.

Guo asserted she 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.

At one point, a senator said to her: "Please mayor, a little more candour than you have shown so far in answering some of the important questions." Yet 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.

Suspicion mounted when, during the hearings, a court in Singapore convicted two of Guo's Chinese former business partners in the Philippines of money-laundering.

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

This revelation sparked another line of inquiry in the Senate: the idea that Guo might be a spy, exercising influence or gathering intelligence for the Chinese state. The idea spread quickly among the watching public, dominating public discussion of the case.

In many ways, Guo had become a victim of her own success. The career she chose and the limelight she worked hard to attract meant that she was fully exposed to public scrutiny when China-Philippines relations soured under President Marcos Jr. 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.

Guo is currently on trial in six separate cases, potentially facing decades in prison, and has been barred from running for public office again. She has pleaded not guilty to human trafficking charges.
Yet many still treasure the memory of their embattled ex-mayor.