In mid-July, No. 37 of the Major Crimes Unit went undercover into an online gambling company in Manila, Philippines, with the coordinates of the Pearl Building, numbered 3B, behind which was the local gambling giant Solair Oriental Group.
This undercover report is known locally as the "undercover storm". Local rumors spread that 3B moved away overnight, and the supervisor ran away. Half a month later, no. 37 of the serious crime team came to the Pearl Building again and found that there were still a large number of young Chinese people with badges in and out. The employees are still engaged in online gambling inside the building, people familiar with the matter said.
At night, the Pearl Mansion gets busy. The three casino buildings on its west side are neon-piercing, and further south, there are also casinos. In this country where the gambling industry is legalized, Manila is like the Las Vegas of the East.
Taxi drivers all know that where casinos gather, there must be Chinese faces.
In recent years, many Chinese to engage in gambling in the Philippines, and they have either been lured or paid high salaries to attract domestic gamblers on the Internet for bookmakers. Behind the huge gambling capital flow of online bookmakers is the overtime work of these Chinese employees, the deduction of passports, the penalty of wages, and even the "little black house" after making mistakes.
Gambling is called "spinach" in the circle. Zhao Ming, an "old spinach" who has changed 3 companies in the Philippines for more than a year, what he does every day is to change his identity and gender to coax chinese people to gamble, "I feel that my personality is going to split." He Yong wanted to "make quick money", but the money in his hands also deepened his anxiety about being caught. In the end, Zhao Ming and He Yong could only plan to flee like many "spinach" and secretly return to China with replacement passports.
Pearl Mansion after the storm
Zhao Ming feels that the "undercover storm" of the Pearl Building in August is a rare "big news" for the "spinach circle".
He was also a member of the Pearl Mansion, promoting at a bookmaker on the 4th floor. In his opinion, the Pearl Building has always been very strictly managed, in addition to security, there is an iron mesh wall behind the building, afraid of outsiders snooping. "When I went undercover, everyone said it was bad luck."
In fact, before the undercover incident, pearl mansions were well-known in the "spinach ring". At the end of a cramped street in the city of Passai in southern Manila, the 5-story white building stands out. The 24-hour gun-on security outside the door makes pedestrians dare not stop, and the only people who can enter and exit at will are those Chinese faces with badges.
In mid-July, No. 37 of the Major Crimes Unit was recruited as an employee of the Pearl Building through a domestic intermediary, and went undercover to work for an online gambling company code-named 3B on the 3rd floor, which belonged to the local gambling giant, Solair Oriental Group. Inside the building, there are more than 50 online bookmakers, large and small, and the staff and supervisors are Chinese. They set up gambling websites that specialize in tricking domestic ginseng into gambling.
Zhao Ming told reporters that the investigative report was a sensation in the Philippines, and there were rumors that 3B evacuated the Pearl Building overnight, and the supervisor also ran away. In the "spinach" forum, 3B became the center of the conversation, laughing, praying, encouraging, and some people joked that they would voluntarily accept 3B employees.
On August 21, half a month after the report was published, the Serious Crimes Unit came to the Pearl Building again on the 37th. Compared to the noisy downtown not far away, it seems calm. Two armed security guards stood in front of the building's glass doors, with few people entering and leaving. The reporter saw that a Shaxian snack opposite the Pearl Building was operating normally, and the Fujian boss said that the business was good, and the people who came to eat were all the employees of the Pearl Building, but when asked about their specific work, the boss no longer answered the phone.
▲ On the evening of August 21, at the entrance of the Pearl Building, there were a number of security personnel, and non-staff were prohibited from entering. Beijing News reporter Li Ming photographed
At 6 p.m., the market dispersed, but the Pearl Building became lively. Groups of young men and women wearing badges walked out together, lingered at the snack bar and Chinese supermarket opposite, and returned to the building after more than ten minutes. The reporter noticed that many people in the crowd used Chinese to communicate, and some people wore vests with the word "Eastern Group".
Some insiders told reporters that these young people are still engaged in online gambling work, and many companies have not closed down after the undercover storm. But what has changed is that the previously famous Pearl Building, now the employees inside have become "hot potatoes", and no company dares to collect them. Bookmakers have almost reached a tacit agreement not to recruit from China, and those who have just been recruited must first observe for a period of time before arranging for a job.
That night, the reporter tried to follow the crowd into the building, just stepped into the gate, was stopped by a male staff member of the security checkpoint and asked to go out, and then was carefully looked at by the gun security guard, the reporter had to leave quickly.
Chinese gambling in Manila
As night went, the Pearl Building began to get busy, and a kilometer to the west, three casino towers lit up neon. Further south, the casino where the building is hidden is also bustling.
Unlike in China, the Philippines legalized the gaming industry more than a decade ago. Today, gambling buildings are everywhere, and Manila at night is becoming more and more like a casino city.
In the eyes of locals in Manila, the Chinese face is a symbol of gambling.
"Where there is a casino, there is Chinese." A taxi driver told reporters that since 2016, more and more Chinese have come to manila to work, working in some gorgeous buildings, "all doing online gambling." He often picked up and dropped off these people, and over time, he also learned simple Chinese such as "hello" and "where to go".
The driver feels that Chinese who works in the casino are very rich, renting a house for 30,000 pesos (about 3,000 yuan) for a month, and the monthly salary can get 90,000 pesos (about 11,000 yuan). In Manila, a white-collar worker's monthly salary is only two or three thousand yuan.
He even knew that the customers of these gambles were Chinese because those games Filipinos wouldn't play. A "spinach" said that these gambling projects are mainly domestic lottery tickets and gambling games such as baccarat and cattle cattle, all of which are Chinese games.
▲ In the famous casino "City of Dreams" in Manila, there are players playing slot machines. Beijing News reporter Li Ming photographed
That said, although these bookmakers are based in the Philippines, their customer base is Chinese. An industry insider told reporters that the owners of many gaming giants in the Philippines are Chinese, and the online gambling business is also opened for domestic personnel, and the main practitioners are mostly Chinese, most of whom are Fujian people.
Su Guojing, chairman of the Asian Responsible Gaming Alliance, said that due to the ban on gambling in the country except for Macau, many Chinese went to Southeast Asia to open casinos, and after the Philippine gaming industry was legalized more than 10 years ago, it attracted a large number of Chinese people. After the development of the Internet, Online gambling has developed rapidly.
Liu Yuchun has been in the Filipino Chinese gambling circle for 10 years, and he has personally experienced this process.
He introduced that at present, not only the Philippines, but also Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and other Chinese in Southeast Asia have engaged in online gambling, which has been particularly prosperous in the past two years.
In May this year, "Spinach", who had been doing customer service for three months at an online gambling company in Cambodia, told reporters that there were hundreds of bookmakers hiding in Bayu City, where the company was located, generally only 20 or 30 people, and customers were also from China.
He revealed that in the local area, all the buildings that appear in a few Chinese are basically doing this business. "There are forty or fifty of us in that building, and they are basically Fujian bosses. They recruit customer service in China, and if they do a few million yuan per month, they will eat the gambler's money and then move to the Philippines to do it. He said that this is the local unspoken rule, and companies that can become big can move to the Philippines.
The hidden gambling business
"Chinese good bet." In Liu Yuchun's view, the Chinese mainland's gambling ban policy has not allowed the gambling industry to disappear below, and the strong market demand has allowed casinos to move overseas.
This early history of folk gambling is a drama.
Liu Yuchun said that as early as the eighties and nineties, Guangdong Fujian and other places on the popular folk lottery, according to the Hong Kong color fruit private opening, at that time to play small, the bookmaker collected the gambling funds, the opening day, with the gambling funds standing on the road waiting for the results, if someone won the jackpot, carrying money will run away, no one will come back to continue to do. Later, someone simply opened a casino and added baccarat and other gameplay. After the domestic ban on gambling, some casinos moved to Southeast Asia, live streaming through video, and gamblers bet remotely through the phone.
Su Guojing said that it was a crazy era, the casino did not need to be publicized, word of mouth among acquaintances, some casinos had a flow of tens of millions of yuan, and the casino owner made a lot of money. After the casino became bigger, the bosses opened a regular gambling group abroad. In recent years, in order to avoid risks, online gambling has emerged.
Liu Yuchun introduced that more than a decade ago, the Philippine government began to issue online gambling licenses, and the Philippines has a regulation that online gambling companies are not allowed to collect bets from their own people. This provision has somewhat exacerbated the pace of bookmakers' expansion into China. Therefore, bookmakers began to recruit a large number of customer service personnel from the country to attract domestic gamblers.
▲ In the Manila casino, there is no shortage of Chinese figures. Beijing News reporter Li Ming photographed
This move has allowed the Philippines to gradually occupy most of the online gambling market in Southeast Asia. Philippine entertainment and gaming company (PAGCOR) announced this year that gaming revenue increased by 7.56% year-on-year. Revenue was reported at 57.34 billion pesos (about 7.5 billion yuan), 4 billion pesos more than in 2017.
Liu Yuchun said that this figure does not fully include the part of online gambling. He explained that the local gaming licenses issued in the Philippines are very limited, most companies are affiliated, and many of them have registered addresses in other countries.
In addition, in order to avoid risks, these companies also subcontract their business. "In the case of Chinese gambling sites, companies in the Philippines are only responsible for customer service promotion, and the URLs and servers may be elsewhere." This means that they do not ostensibly open casinos, thus avoiding more risks.
Pearl Building 3B, which was previously undercover in The No. 37 of the Serious Crimes Unit, was actually a customer service center of the Eastern Group.
Sun Da was recruited to work in the finance position of The Eastern Group for 10 months, and at first he was also assigned to the Pearl Building. He revealed that the Oriental Group has hundreds of markets, involving dozens of games such as live video and slot machines, and the internal unity is divided by code names. Players can deposit funds on the betting platform to participate in the bet, and they can choose to withdraw money or continue to bet.
A one-day flow screenshot of a comprehensive market of the Oriental Group provided by it shows that on August 13 this year alone, 58 people recharged more than 1.48 million yuan online, and another 462 people paid more than 1.63 million yuan online. In other words, one of the platforms under the group has a daily income of 3 million yuan.
Sun Da said that the money recharged by the platform was mostly transited by domestic banks and was often frozen by banks. Later, the group developed a third-party platform to absorb players' recharge funds, and players withdrew cash through the platform, and sometimes transferred money with bank cards bought back from China. He admitted that this move was actually money laundering.
Sun Da said that during his work, the group had about 10,000 Chinese employees, and financial colleagues often joked that the group's monthly salary was more than 100 million. The employees here, including the managers, get along cautiously, and everyone doesn't know who the biggest boss above is.
In Su Guojing's view, for the domestic police, these companies are difficult to investigate. "According to Chinese law, attracting domestic personnel to participate in gambling can be punished for opening casinos, but the Philippine bookmakers are legal on the surface, and only do customer service promotion business, and other subcontracting is equivalent to saying that they have only completed one part of the gambling link."
Chinese employees on the betting chain
Fujian people Zhao Ming and He Yong are both people on this ring.
Zhao Ming was a fisherman before going to the Philippines, and he drifted for 20 days a month in exchange for an income of four or five thousand. More than a year ago, a friend recommended him to a job at an "electronics company" with a visa and a monthly salary of 6,000, but in Cambodia.
The interview was simple, with 45 typing per minute on the computer, which was far easier than his fishing.
In March last year, Zhao Ming arrived in Cambodia, but was transferred directly to the Philippines by the company's people. The so-called electronics company is actually an online gambling company, a computer lobby with fifty or sixty young Chinese sitting, dark and noisy.
Zhao Ming, whose passport was withheld, had to stay. It wasn't until his training that he learned that he needed to be engaged in online gambling customer service. The supervisor teaches how to add domestic friends and how to change identities to trick each other into gambling.
In business, Zhao was obviously clumsy, and he was deducted 2,000 yuan per month for this. Three months later, he paid more than 10,000 yuan to the company and left.
The money left him almost penniless, and in desperation, he ran to Chinatown to work as a warehouse manager. The salary was low, just enough for daily expenses, but it made him feel free.
Earlier this year, 20-year-old Zheng Yang also boarded a plane to the Philippines. The purpose of his trip was simple: "to make quick money." ”
He owed more than 20,000 yuan on his domestic credit card, and when he saw the news that the circle of friends "salary from 7,000 yuan, including air tickets and accommodation", he did not hesitate to apply for a visa to travel to the Philippines. Zheng Yang knew in his heart that this was "illegal", and when asked by others, he reminded that "knowing too much may not be good." Facing his family, he lied about going to Germany to work, "sounding more high-end." ”
Zheng Yang applied for a bookmaker in a city south of Manila, and the position was also promoted online. Unlike Zhao Ming, Zheng Yang got started quickly. At first, he could only barely complete the performance every month and get the final salary. But after two or three months, he can pull players to bet more than 400,000 yuan on the platform, and the income is three or four times the basic salary.
"Earlier, the bosses in Fujian would bring a lot of fellow villagers to do it, and after they became bigger, they began to recruit the whole country." Su Guojing laughed and said that nowadays in some places in Fujian, almost all villages have moved to the Philippines to do gambling, and when local girls get married, they must inquire whether the man works in the Philippines.
"Spiritual devastation" and the road to escape
After the Spring Festival in 2018, Zhao Ming, who could not save money, once again moved the idea of gambling. In February, he went to the 4th floor of the Pearl Building to return to his old business.
Compared with the previous company, the scale of six or seven hundred people here also means that the company has higher business requirements and stricter management.
For several months, Zhao Ming held three or four mobile phones every day and chatted with different people, seducing and cajoling. In the gambling group, colleagues pretended to be "masters", "gamblers", "winners", and speculated day and night. For customers who lose money, they will also recommend some loan platforms to let them borrow money to gamble.
This still disgusts Zhao Ming, but the amount of bets bets by gamblers determines whether Zhao Ming and his colleagues can complete the performance and get paid. He felt it was a "spiritual devastation."
Zhao Ming once witnessed a gambler lose nearly three million family properties, which made him blame himself and began to secretly "help others" in his own way. Zhao Ming said that once, one of his female customers lost 20,000 yuan on the platform, and he secretly added the other party's WeChat to tell the other party the inside story of the dealer's trading and advised her to close it. "Just that day to catch the salary, I transferred 4,000 yuan to her."
Zheng Yang had a similar experience. He said that a female nurse bet 20,000 yuan on her own line and lost in two days. Later in the chat, he learned that the other party's money was borrowed, so he recommended a project that could win money to the other party and helped her win back the money.
This devastation also stems from the life of "militarized management". Late arrivals on leave are deducted from wages, smoking is limited to time, and work cards are worn at any time, while employees will be locked up in "small black rooms" for behaviors such as group chat and playing mobile phones at work.
Zheng Yang also does not like life in the Philippines, but more pressure comes from fear of the law. The better the performance, the more money he earns, the deeper his fear of "being caught". "I know it's against the law and I could be caught at any time."
In recent years, the Ministry of Public Security has cracked down organizing Chinese citizens to gamble abroad and online gambling crimes, directed the detection of more than 110 transnational gambling cases, arrested more than 3,200 members of criminal gangs, and frozen and recovered nearly 10 billion yuan of gambling-related funds.
These cases seem to remind Zheng Yang at all times. In this strange country, Zheng Yang drew a circle for his life, honestly working in the company, eating in the canteen, returning to the dormitory to sleep after work, and saving enough money to return to China to live.
After working for half a year, Zhao Ming's performance still did not improve, and most of his salary was deducted; Zheng Yang was also under pressure and began to plan to return to China.
According to the rules of the bookmaker, employees who have not left for one year have to pay tens of thousands of yuan in compensation in exchange for the deducted passport. Similar to many "spinaches", they can only privately apply for passports and secretly return to China.
In Zhao Ming's words, this is equivalent to "fleeing for life."
Zheng Yang had heard of the fate of failure. "Before someone escaped, everyone got on the plane, or they were caught by the company." He said that the people who escaped stole the company's information and were found to have brought it back, and were beaten up. Zhao Ming also knows that after the bookmaker finds that someone has fled, it will offer a reward to track it in major gambling forums and groups, and rely on local relations to stop it in the Philippines, once caught, the consequences will be unimaginable.
Zheng Yang had to use his lunch break to run out of the company, go to the Chinese Embassy 20 kilometers away to get a replacement passport, and then return immediately. Zhao Ming directly packed his bags and escaped from the company, found a Chinese hotel to stay, confirmed safety, and went to the embassy.
This has almost become the only way for the "spinach" to return to China. In the embassy, there are young and panicked faces like them every day. An agent who has been entrusting visas at the embassy for many years told reporters that many young Chinese to replace their passports, looking anxious, they will say that their passports have been robbed, but in fact, they are all withheld by bookmakers. At most, he had passports for 18 "spinaches" a day. Sometimes, these people are worried about safety, and he will arrange a Chinese hotel for them, and three or five people will stay up for the few days before returning to China.
One day in mid-August, Zhao Ming and He Yong met at the Chinese Embassy. After getting their passports, they are about to become one of the "spinaches" who can escape smoothly. (Zhao Ming, Zheng Yang, Sun Da, etc. are pseudonyms in the text)
Beijing News reporter Li Ming Pan Jiakun
Edited by Gan Hao, Pan Jiakun, proofread by Lu Aiying