6 illegal recruiters nabbed in entrapment operation

22Oct09

Authorities have arrested six persons who duped an aspiring overseas Filipino worker (OFW) into paying a large sum of money in exchange for a non-existent job abroad, Vice President Noli De Castro said.

In a statement, De Castro identified the suspects as Carmela Liong, Gilda Camasura, Ginny De Jesus, Jimmy De Jesus, Edwin Ondoy, and Rodolfo Malenas of a recruitment firm called GMC Consultancy, which is based in Malate, Manila.

De Castro, who is also head of the Task Force Against Illegal Recruitment (Tfair), said the arrest of the six stemmed from the complaint of Ryan Barreto who said Liong had promised him a high-paying job in exchange for a huge amount of money.

But the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) revealed that Liong and the GMC Consultancy were not authorized to deploy workers abroad.

Assisted by the POEA, Barretto personally appeared before the Tfair office in Camp Crame in Quezon City to file a complaint against Liong and the GMC Consultancy for the violation of RA 8042 or the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995 and Article 315 of the Revised Penal Code.

Last week, the Tfair and POEA conducted an entrapment operation wherein Liong was arrested after she accepted marked money from the complainant. The suspects were then taken to Camp Crame where they are currently being detained.

Seized from the suspects were the marked money, mobile phones, and travel documents of overseas job applicants.

Earlier, the Task Force Against Illegal Recruitment (Tfair) named the suspected illegal recruiters with the most number of pending warrants of arrest.

Senior Superintendent Gilbert Sosa, Tfair operations chief, said that at least 276 Filipinos have a total of more than 20,000 unserved warrants of arrest for large-scale illegal recruitment.

Of the 276 suspects, 68 have double digit warrants of arrests.

But Sosa had also told GMANews.TV earlier that they have already narrowed down these arrests after the task force conducted several back-to-back entrapment operations.

Sosa, who is also from the Philippine National Police’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, said they plan to come up with a list of the top 50 “most wanted persons” in large-scale illegal recruitment and seek public help in rounding them up.

The POEA had also earlier warned OFWs against agencies that continue to operate despite having suspended or cancelled licenses.

The POEA said it has canceled the licenses of 451 recruitment agencies since the start of its operations and placed 44 others under preventive suspension.

From 2008 until the first eight months of 2009 alone, the POEA had canceled 74 operating licenses and suspended or fined 22 agencies due to recruitment violations.

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Based on statistics supplied by the non-government organization Initiatives for Dialogue and Empowerment through Alternative Legal Services (Ideals), there were 1,662 confirmed victims of illegal recruitment from January to November 2008, an increase of four percent from 1,539 during the same period in 2007.

According to the POEA, a total of 1,236,013 Filipinos were deployed in 2008. – GMANews.TV