The police hadn’t warned anyone in local government, suspecting that most of them were in cahoots with the criminals. What they didn’t know was that the town’s popular young mayor, Alice Guo, was a key architect of the brazen enterprise. Investigations later showed how she charmed her way to wealth and power and used that to open up her town of 78,000 people to thugs and thieves.

Philippine investigators say Guo, who they believe is 34 years old, owned the land on which the scam den was built, co-founded the firm that managed it and was complicit in the illegal activity it hosted. With her explicit support, they say, gangsters set up operations there for thousands of scammers to ensnare victims online.

The fraud is called pig butchering because scammers “fatten” up their targets by entangling them in romantic relationships online, convince them to invest in bogus financial schemes, then “butcher” them by disappearing with their money. U.S. officials say the scams often target elderly American citizens, and are difficult to monitor and trace.

The March raid set off a dizzying spiral of events that led Guo to flee the Philippines. A weekslong multinational manhunt ensued, ending with a late-night bust in September when Guo was found hiding behind a door in an apartment near the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Video shows her asking for permission to change out of her pink pajamas before police took her away.

She is now in jail awaiting trial on half a dozen charges, including human trafficking and corruption, and is being investigated in more crimes.

While industrial-scale scam compounds have sprouted across Southeast Asia, they have often been located in lawless or conflict-torn states such as Myanmar. But the enclave at Bamban shows how the criminals behind them became so emboldened by years of impunity that they barely bothered to hide. They set up their operation in plain sight in a town near the capital of one of Asia’s more stable democracies, taking advantage of pervasive corruption in the country.

It was so close to the mayor’s desk she could see the walls of the compound through the windows of her office building.

The Wall Street Journal was given rare access to the 25-acre compound. Inside were dormitories where some 3,000 workers—most of them Chinese, some Vietnamese and Filipino—slept between shifts as scammers. Close by were offices where police seized thousands of devices filled with evidence, such as fake social-media profiles and financial transaction records. The rooms still smelled like ashtrays, and were littered with rotting fruit and other food left in lunch containers.

Police found several armored Land Rovers and a Cadillac, and the hidden entrance to a tunnel they suspect was part of the escape route the crime bosses used to evade the raid.

Across the street from the compound, shopkeepers and hairdressers at a commercial strip said they didn’t know about the criminal enterprise. Some neighbors thought it was a customer-service call center, which are common in the Philippines, where English is widely spoken.

A stranger comes to town

The facts about who Guo is and where she came from are so inconsistent and unusual that some Filipino politicians have accused her of being a Chinese spy, although they haven’t offered any evidence of espionage.

What Philippine investigators say they are sure of is that she is a Chinese national whose real name is Guo Hua Ping, and that she came to the Philippines from China when she was a child. In 2005, when she was a teenager, she fraudulently obtained a Philippine birth certificate under the name Alice Leal Guo, they say.

That name, they later discovered, also belonged to someone else who had the same date of birth as the one registered on the allegedly fraudulent birth certificate. Investigators haven’t been able to locate the woman whose identity they say Guo stole.

Guo denies these allegations. She testified to lawmakers in May that she was born in the Philippines to a Chinese father and a Filipina mother. Her mother abandoned her when she was little. Her father was from China’s Fujian province, she said.

She said she was born in her rural home, which is why she had no birth certificate, and was home-schooled for most of her youth.

Guo’s testimony was vague and at times contradictory. She responded to several questions by saying that she couldn’t remember. Guo couldn’t be reached and her lawyers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Hidden in plain sight

Locals spoke of Guo with affection. She and her Chinese father showed up in Bamban when she was about 14 years old, according to four residents who knew the family. She was a polite child, and people sympathized with her because she had no mother.

One of the residents, Arsenia Mamangan, said that around 2005, she sold Guo’s father a small plot of land so he could start a piggery. Mamangan, now 90, said she loved the girl, inviting her over for meals and sending her home with fresh papayas from the garden.

Locals said they admired how Guo worked hard from a young age. By the time she was about 17 she was running the pig farm, they said, and her father was rarely around. They described her as an enterprising woman, branching out over the next decade into real estate, buying and managing property.

Official documents obtained by the Journal show that in February 2019, Guo purchased a plot of farmland in the middle of town, adjacent to the town hall. In March that year, she asked the local government to reclassify the land as commercial. Less than three weeks later, in what officials described as an unusually quick turnaround, her request was approved.

To manage the property, Guo, along with a few others, incorporated a company called Baofu Land Development in May 2019.

One of the co-founders was Huang Zhiyang, whom Chinese authorities later identified as wanted on allegations related to running illegal online gambling operations. Philippine police described Huang, who is ethnically Chinese and has a Cypriot passport, as one of the key bosses of the compound’s criminal operations. Authorities believe he fled the country after the raid. He is wanted in the Philippines.

Two of the other co-founders were Chinese nationals who were convicted this year in Singapore’s biggest-ever money laundering case. Singapore authorities accused the pair of laundering proceeds of their “overseas organized crime activities” in the financial hub. The Singapore Police Force declined to say if operations at the Bamban site were part of their probe.

The enclave’s construction began around the time of the 2019 incorporation. Documents show the building permits were requested a year later and were approved within a day. The compound did at times have a license to run online gambling for players outside the country, called POGOs, but Philippine investigators say the primary activity in the enclave was scams, beginning around 2020.

In 2022, Guo ran for mayor of Bamban. Locals said she campaigned in her private helicopter. Children would clap and squeal with joy each time they saw it overhead—black with a pink stripe painted on the side.

Guo won the election and assumed office in June that year. One of her first acts as mayor was to paint the municipal hall pink, her favorite color.

She quickly gained popularity in Bamban, where locals said she repaired roads and threw big parties with food and music. During her tenure, the town got two new fast-food joints—a McDonald’s and a Jollibee, a fried-chicken chain.

All along, authorities say, Guo was raking in money from the criminal enclave. In August, they sought money-laundering charges against her and 35 alleged co-conspirators they say carried out a complex scheme of laundering proceeds from crimes including human trafficking and fraud. Authorities sought to recover more than $100 million worth of assets they said were acquired by Guo and her associates through unlawful activities.

These included real estate, a fleet of luxury vehicles and Guo’s helicopter.

The raid

During the Covid-19 pandemic, scam compounds like the one in Bamban emerged all over Southeast Asia. They generate tens of billions of dollars in illicit profits every year and employ hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom are trafficked in and kept there by force. Survivors who managed to escape or were rescued have said they were threatened and afraid to alert the outside world.

Most scammers inside the Bamban enclave worked there voluntarily, but some were held against their will, Philippine authorities said. Often they were trapped by debts to their employers after taking out loans to get them there and board them.

In early 2024, authorities got an important tip. A Malaysian named Dylan Lim contacted his country’s embassy in Manila and told them he had been duped by a friend into entering the compound at Bamban and wasn’t allowed out. He said a man took away his mobile phone and told him if he wanted to leave he would have to work there for six months.

Lim, 27, told the Journal he was trained for five days on how to run a pig-butchering scam. He was given a mobile phone and asked to contact people through the messaging apps WeChat and QQ, both Chinese platforms. He was supposed to convince them to invest in bogus forex and oil schemes.

He said he used the mobile phone to send secret messages to the embassy’s police attaché, who traced his location. The Malaysians informed a Philippine agency called PAOCC, the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission.

Operatives from elite police units and other law-enforcement agencies took part in the March 13 raid. When they arrived they saw hundreds of people lined up near the entrance holding their belongings, ready to flee. The criminals had been tipped off and more than 2,000 had already gotten away, authorities said.

Lim’s eyes filled with tears when police officers arrived at his dormitory. “At times I thought that maybe I would die there,” he said.

Agents searched the site for days. Many of the luxury villas were still under construction, but four appeared inhabited. In the basement of one villa, behind a freezer, a fake wall concealed a hidden passageway to the house next door. Authorities say the tunnel helped the bosses escape.

The manhunt

Lawmakers summoned Guo to testify at a senate inquiry in May. After attending several hearings, she disappeared.

She was suspended as mayor in June. A few weeks later, staff in the mayor’s office said, the municipal building was painted white again.

Guo slipped away under cover of darkness one night in late July, she later testified. She said she boarded a yacht at a port in Manila and set off on a dayslong journey to Malaysia, changing vessels twice along the way and idling at sea for long periods. From there she entered Singapore and then went on to Indonesia.

After more than a month on the lam, authorities flew her back to Manila. Police Maj. Jessie James Domingo, who took over as Bamban’s acting police chief after Guo’s downfall, said the full scale of her crimes isn’t known.

“We’re still trying to connect the dots,” he said.

Bella Perez-Rubio contributed to this article.

Write to Feliz Solomon at [email protected], Patricia Kowsmann at [email protected] and Jemal R. Brinson at [email protected]