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In 2021, BI will have stopped over 600 attempts at human trafficking.

MANILA, Philippines – In 2021, the Bureau of Immigration (BI) prevented 688 attempts at human trafficking and illegal recruiting in the country’s international ports.

Commissioner Jaime Morente said in a statement on Friday that the bureau had also postponed the departure of 13,680 passengers, the majority of whom had proper documentation.

“We’ve been watching these unlawful recruiters’ efforts for the past year. “The victims are frequently provided bogus passports or fed fake statements, either to work illegally overseas or to attempt to flee to countries where deployment prohibitions have been imposed,” he continued in the statement.

“In these tough times, Filipinos in desperate financial need fall prey to unlawful recruiters who promise them rich positions abroad,” stated the BI chief.

Ma. Timotea Barizo, the chief of the BI’s Travel Control and Enforcement Unit (TCEU), listed common human trafficking tactics including falsifying Overseas Employment Certificates (OECs) and tampering with Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) paperwork.

“There have been occasions where leaving passengers have presented fraudulent POEA stamps to make it look that their documents have been cleared,” she said.

Another technique involves the use of fake or expired work visas for first-time OFWs or “Balik-Manggagawa” or vacationing OFWs.

“In some circumstances, we discover OECs that are genuine but do not correspond to the passenger’s visa.” This is also unlawful, because it lists the OFW under one job only to wind up with a separate one that pays much less than what was agreed upon,” Barizo stated.

In some cases, she said, ambitious OFWs are granted legal OECs and employment documents but are given separate visas to work for a different business in a foreign nation.

These travelers would usually provide employment documents with job sites in the Maldives, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, or Albania, but their eventual destination would be the United Arab Emirates.

She went on to say that juvenile Filipinos are still being recruited to work as household service workers (HSWs) in other countries, with the majority of them being women between the ages of 17 and 21.

To achieve the HSW minimum age requirement of 23 years old, these recruited employees generally assume the identities of others and exhibit fraudulently obtained passports at airports.

Human traffickers and illegal recruiters have also advised victims to mislead immigration agents about their purpose of travel, with some using marriage certificates to pretend to see their purported spouses abroad.

“Our forensic documents laboratory confirmed the certificates to be authentic, but the marriages were shams, and the victims had no idea who their claimed spouses were,” Barizo explained.

She went on to say that attempting to work overseas on tourist visas is still a frequent practice.

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