What you’re seeing in Cambodia today is not just a regional crime story… it’s a warning shot for the Philippines.

This week, 190 Filipino overseas workers finally made it home after being trafficked into Cambodia, now widely known as the illegal gambling and scam capital of Southeast Asia, if not the entire continent.

They were lured with promises of high-paying jobs abroad, only to end up trapped inside criminal compounds run by foreign syndicates. At the airport on Thursday, February 5, they were received by officials from the Department of Migrant Workers. One female OFW was left behind, still too sick to travel.

Online, the evidence is chilling. Viral videos show victims bound, terrified, and screaming for help from balconies in places like Star Bay in Sihanoukville.

Many never make it out. Reports say South Koreans, Indonesians, and other Asians have died inside scam camps controlled by Chinese-linked gangs.

Victims are forced to become online scammers under threat, abuse, and confinement.

Indonesia has already repatriated 110 of its citizens.

And then there’s Park Min-ho.

The 20-year-old South Korean was recruited in July 2025 with what looked like a legitimate job offer. Instead, it was a trap. He was trafficked to Kampot Province and held inside a criminal compound tied to a Chinese syndicate running online fraud operations.

Park never came home alive. On October 21, 2025, he returned to South Korea in ashes, sealed inside a small urn.

This is Cambodia today: a country hollowed out by foreign-run gambling, scam hubs, and human trafficking networks.

Now imagine if the same system had fully taken over the Philippines.

Because it almost did.

If President Bongbong Marcos had not stopped Chinese-dominated offshore gaming operations, POGOs, in 2024, the Philippines could now look like Sihanoukville.

The same escapes. The same kidnappings. The same dead bodies.

In fact, those viral scenes of people running, jumping, and begging for help already happened in the Philippines before, during the explosion of POGOs under the Duterte administration.

Instead of stopping it early, the Duterte government protected it.

While former president Rodrigo Duterte waged a bloody “drug war” that overwhelmingly targeted poor Filipinos, many victims of frame-ups and planted evidence by corrupt tokhang cops, Chinese gaming operations were allowed to flourish.

POGOs became hotbeds not just for gambling, but for kidnapping, killings, drugs, and human trafficking.

Now cases are being filed against members of the Duterte family, long viewed as one of the most powerful and controversial political dynasties in the country.

Was the family part of the machine?

Vice President Sara Duterte is now being accused of acting as a so-called “drug money and POGO queen,” allegedly receiving massive kickbacks tied to Chinese drug lords. Her husband, Manases “Mans” Carpio, and her brother, Paolo “Pulong” Duterte, are also being linked to drug smuggling and other criminal operations.

The allegations point to something bigger than personalities: a system. What many now call the Philippine POGO machine, a structure that normalized foreign-run crime hubs in the heart of the country.

Cambodia shows where that road leads.

It leads to enslaved workers, scam factories, dead teenagers in urns, and cities ruled by syndicates instead of law.

Yet despite the evidence, die-hard Duterte fanatics continue to distort reality and flood social media with denial and propaganda.

This is the harsh truth: these political cultists aren’t just loud online, they are dangerous to the country’s future.

Cambodia is no longer just a headline abroad. It is the Philippines’ dark mirror, a future we narrowly escaped.