LAST week, the Function Room of the Pinnacle Hotel was packed with representatives across the island during the Mindanao Summit on Migration Environment, Peace and Development. This theme recognizes “that migration in Mindanao is deeply interconnected with inequality, environmental degradation, landlessness, climate change, conflict, disasters, displacement, labor exploitation, gnder injustice, and uneven development. These interlocking conditions shape the vulnerabilities and choices of migrants, their families and their communities.”
One of the thematic areas during the summit was the irregular migration corridors presented by the Interagency Council Against Trafficking – National Special Committee on Irregular Migration Corridors (IACAT-NSCIMC) What we found disturbing was the emerging new pathway for trafficking using technology.
On June 20, 2025, six people walked into the Davao International Airport carrying what looked like an ordinary weekend booking to Singapore. It was not. Bureau of Immigration officers who flagged the group found they had been recruited by a fellow Filipino. Through the social media platform Telegram, they were promised jobs as customer service representatives in Cambodia, and handed fake travel documents and a return ticket to make the trip look like tourism. One of the six had already paid the recruiter ₱50,000. The BI said the pattern — same platform, same cover story, same route out of Davao — pointed to a single syndicate running recruitment on repeat.
That single case is not one of a kind. It is a symptom of something Davao City’s own data has been quietly confirming for a yearthis city is not just a place where trafficking victims come from. It is a place where trafficking is organized.
Councilor Rachel Zozobrado, who chairs the city council’s Committee on Internal Relations and Migrant Workers, laid out the numbers in a privilege speech this year that should unsettle anyone who thinks of scamhub trafficking as a Manila problem, or a Myanmar problem, or someone else’s problem. Davao City recorded 72 human traffickingrelated cases in 2025 — the highest of any local government unit in the entire Davao Region. Davao del Norte followed with 13, Davao Oriental with 12, Davao del Sur with 10, Davao de Oro with two, and Davao Occidental with none.
Zoom into the barangay level and the geography sharpens further. Of the 72 individuals in DavaoCity who sought an Illegal Recruitment Certificate, the largest numbers came from Talomo (16), Marilog (15), Toril (nine), and Calinan (seven), with smaller clusters in Buhangin, Bunawan, Poblacion, Agdao, Paquibato, and Tugbok. Eleven more cases could not be traced to a specific barangay but were confirmed to have originated in the city.
Perhaps the most damning figure, though, is one that flips the usual victim narrative on its head. Citing Department of Migrant Workers Region XI data, Zozobrado said 60 percent of suspected illegal recruiters operating anywhere in the Davao Region are themselves residents of, or maintain offices in, Davao City. We are not simply exporting the vulnerable. We are housing the recruiters.
This is the backdrop against which Zozobrado filed the proposed Safe Migration Ordinance in Davao — the Kalinga sa Miranteng Dabawenyo Ordinance of 2026. Her diagnosis of the current system is blunt: it reacts to harm instead of preventing it. “Investigations are done only after a complaint. Rescues are made after the abuse,” she told the council, describing a protection framework that only switches on once someone has already been defrauded, confined, or worse.
The ordinance would designate a month each year — Davao City Safe Migration and Anti-Illegal Recruitment Month — for a sustained information campaign across city channels, aimed at the specific, learnable warning signs of trafficking recruitment: passport confiscation, contract substitution, deployment on a tourist visa instead of a work visa, coerced accommodation debt, and the recruitment of minors. It would also build something Davao currently lacks — a single, clear referral pathway. A Davao City Safe Migration OFW Families’ Welfare and Crisis Center would connect directly to the Local Committee on Anti-Trafficking, and from there to the IACAT, the DSWD, and the PNP Women and Children Protection Desk.
It is worth pairing this local push with what is happening nationally, because Davao’s recruiters are not operating in a vacuum. The Anti-POGO Act of 2025 permanently banned offshore gaming operations after years of evidence that POGO licenses were being used as legal cover for scam hubs — the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking itself confirmed as much to the Senate. But the ban has not ended the industry; it has scattered it. Raids since the law took effect — dozens of workers rounded up in Parañaque, Makati, and Pasig, roughly 400 foreign nationals arrested in one Manila scam farm — show operators simply dropping the POGO label while running the same operations. IACAT investigators have even flagged a grim adaptation: some previously raided operators started hiring more Filipinos instead of foreigners, specifically to look less like a trafficking case on paper.
Meanwhile the recruitment pipeline that starts in Davao does not stop at Singapore or Cambodia. A National Bureau of Investigation case this May involved 25 Filipinos repatriated from Myanmar who told investigators they were promised legitimate customer service jobs and instead found their passports confiscated, their movement restricted, and quotas enforced through intimidation and financial penalties once they were inside a scam compound. Their recruiter, NBI confirmed, was never licensed by the Department of Migrant Workers to begin with.
That last detail is the thread connecting all of it. Almost none of these operations require sophistication to stop at the source, they require a licensing check, a referral desk, a barangay official who knows what contract substitution looks like, and a family that knows where to ask before a son or daughter boards a flight. Zozobrado’s ordinance is not a dramatic intervention. It is a plumbing fix: routing information and complaints to the agencies that already exist, before the harm rather than after it.
Davao City has spent the last year producing the clearest local picture in Mindanao of how this trade actually works, which barangays, which platforms, which cover stories, which percentage of the region’s recruiters call this city home. What the city does with that picture now, whether the council passes an ordinance built on prevention or waits for the next family to claim a child at the airport cargo bay, is the test of whether all that data amounts to anything more than a very well-documented tragedy. This matters most.
