Where is the next Philippines?

Today marks 420 days since Philippine President Marcos signed Presidential Order No. 54 in 2024 to combat POGO.

Since that day, practitioners in the Philippines have undergone arrests, purges, guerrilla tactics, and migrations. The Chinese ecosystem once centered around POGO in the Philippines has been uprooted, leaving only a few licensed PIGO operators and a handful of teams barely surviving through guerrilla warfare.

The majority of people have dispersed to Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, UAE, Bahrain, Brazil, and even some African countries.

From that day, the industry was completely shattered. Therefore, everyone is hoping that one of these countries can pick up the mantle of the Philippines and continue its past glory.

However, the past glory of the Philippines was built on the purely benign gambling industry, targeting the single offshore market of China and the tense bilateral relations.

In this rupture, however, the gambling industry has gradually been endowed with new symbols.

As tens of thousands of romance scam news swept across Southeast Asia, the line between gambling platforms and scam groups has become increasingly blurred, and gambling has gradually been globally classified as a breeding ground for the scam industry.

Once the perception of "Gambling Industry = Scam Industry" is established, it irreversibly changes the industry's position in global recognition.

At the same time, governments around the world have also unprecedentedly heightened their focus on the issue of "cross-border scams."

The United Nations, ASEAN, and G20 member countries have all listed combating scams and cleaning up underground gambling networks as national-level topics.

The gambling industry, which originally survived on lax regulation and weak law enforcement, suddenly found that there are no longer enough "anarchic zones" to hide in the world.

More importantly, once the gambling industry is broadly recognized as a scam industry, a country that wants to continue to act as a protector of offshore gambling must not only tolerate the economic grey production but must also confront the global anti-scam law enforcement system with political power.

Whether it's Thailand, Sri Lanka, or even the most barbaric Myanmar, a country needs to have the will to confront the world system or the ability to withstand international political and economic pressures.

Clearly, in today's world, no country is willing or able to adopt a semi-official stance like the Philippines did in the past, to take on and legalize large-scale offshore gambling.

No more illusions! The next Philippines no longer exists!