Filipino mail-order brides trafficked to China: alarm in Philippines over links to Chinese organised crime

The Bureau of Immigration revealed in early March that immigration officers had intercepted a 20-year-old Filipino woman and a 34-year-old Chinese man who were attempting to travel to Shenzhen on February 28 as a married couple.

“This is obviously another case of the mail-order bride scheme that has resurfaced recently,” said bureau Commissioner Norman Tansingco in a press release.

The pair were able to provide a genuine Philippine marriage certificate, but officers became suspicious after noticing inconsistencies in their statements, according to the release.

The woman later admitted that no marriage had occurred, and that she had paid 45,000 pesos (US$810) – more than twice the average monthly income in the Philippines – for an agent to process the document.

In another incident from February, officers barred a Filipino woman from leaving the country with a Chinese national who had been working in the Philippines and claimed to be her husband. The pair also provided a seemingly authentic marriage certificate showing they wed in the southern Philippines in 2022, yet an inspection of the man’s travel records revealed he was not in the country at that time.

The man later admitted to paying a China-based agency 40,000 pesos to process the documents.

Four such couples have been intercepted so far this year, according to immigration officials, who expressed particular concern over their ability to produce authentic documents.

Initial investigations by the immigration bureau’s anti-fraud section showed the certificates were “seemingly original”, deputy spokesman Melvin Mabulac told media on March 7, prompting the Department of Justice, as head of the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking, “to further conduct a probe on how these