The President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., has introduced a ban on all Philippines Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) by the end of the year.
This announcement was made during Marcos’ State of the Nation Address (SONA) and comes in light of many groups calling for POGO operations to cease, owing to several scandals linked to them, with there being a recent increase in the fight against foreign crime syndicates, as well as illegal offshore gaming operators.
Money laundering had been one crime connected to the illegal POGOs and their operations.
At the end of June, Philippines Senator Joel Villanueva pushed for a ban on all forms of online gambling in the region, seeking to prohibit POGOs also, while in July the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) underlined that POGOs hubs would not be allowed to operate anymore.
In his speech, Marcos said: “Effective today, all POGOs are banned. I hereby instruct PAGCOR to wind down and cease the operations of POGOs by the end of the year.
“Disguising as legitimate entities, their operations have ventured into elicit areas farthest from gaming such as financial scamming, money laundering, prostitution, human trafficking, kidnapping, brutal torture, even murder."
In other news within Asia, there have been reports that the recent Microsoft outage has affected three Macau gaming operators, though this was only on back-end office computers and not front-end gaming machines.
