POGO OPERATIONS

How do POGO operations work?

The POGO employees you see here are basically marketing agents and tech support specialists–all to serve a Mandarin-speaking clientele. Most have the job of identifying and contacting China-domiciled gamblers and luring them to play cards, lottery, and other casino games online. They use cameras and headsets to communicate with gamblers watching from abroad. The tech support teams are present to make sure everything moves smoothly. Buy-ins can go as high as US$3 Mn per operator per day.

Certain articles have likened POGO employment to modern-day slavery. According to these reports, POGO employees left their factory jobs in provincial China in plight to escape poverty. They were promised salaries of as much as US$2,800 per month, but after deducting several fees charged by their recruiters, only took home US$1,000. They work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day–longer than what they were used to back home. They’re picked up from and dropped off at their assigned living spaces daily and are prohibited from traveling outside of Manila. Some say that employees who didn’t hit their quotas were beaten up. Sadly, a number of them want to go back to their country but cannot, either for fear of being prosecuted or because their recruiters wouldn’t allow them to. If you think about it, their story resembles our OFWs’.

I think the reason why they’re so unruly is because they don’t know any better. These people are factory workers in the provinces, unaccustomed to “Western etiquette”. I’ve heard of stories where a Chinese, who upon arriving here, saw an elevator for the first time and happily rode it up and down–repeatedly, or a group of Chinese, in the excitement of seeing a swimming pool, dove in their underwear.

What I’m not sure about is how these POGO operations transitioned from offshore gambling to illegal practices in the Philippines. If they were so profitable marketing to Mainland Chinese, why even rock the boat?