Cops raid PCSO games in Pangasinan

DAGUPAN CITY—Attempts by the Philippine Charity Sweeptakes Office’s (PCSO) Peryahan Games to conquer bet-rich Pangasinan province have been spoiled by police raids on the game’s draw center in Laoac town.

Edward Aguilar, spokesperson of Global Tech Mobile Online Corp., which owns the Peryahan Games franchise here, said the draw center had been raided three times since it opened on Dec. 20 last year.

Two days after the draw center opened, Aguilar said, the police raided it and detained six sales agents at the local police station. The agents were released after questioning, he said.

The Peryahan Games is a state-run numbers game that resembles the illegal “jueteng.” It is being pilot-tested in Pangasinan, the 13th province to host the game.

On Dec. 23, a team from the regional and provincial police, the National Bureau of Investigation and the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group again raided the center and took the same agents to the police station and the NBI headquarters in Manila for questioning before they were released, he said.

On Jan. 14, NBI agents conducted a third raid and took nine sales agents and four bet collectors to the NBI office in Manila.

“Yesterday (Jan. 21), they were released, along with a resolution from the Department of Justice indicating they were not engaged in the illegal numbers game, jueteng,” Aguilar said.

The nine sales agents were armed with PCSO identification cards, gadgets used to print bets and certifications attesting to their employment by Global Tech.

The four bet collectors, who are not Global Tech employees, are still being held at the NBI, Aguilar said.

On Friday, the police said that Global Tech’s operations are legitimate.

Senior Supt. Reynaldo Biay, Pangasinan police director, said the raids were undertaken to determine the legitimacy of Global Tech’s gaming operations.

But the police would continue to monitor these operations to make sure these are not used as cover for jueteng, Biay said.

Like jueteng, players of Peryahan Games select two numbers from a series beginning with 1 and ending with 38. Sales agents record these numbers on gadgets called “Point of Sale” before they collect the players’ bets.

Global Tech sales agents are not salaried employees. They earn 7.5 percent of the bets they collect and deposit these to a company cashier who pays out winnings each day.

Winning numbers are drawn three times daily at 11 a.m., 4 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Biay said the police wanted to make sure jueteng operators would not piggy-back on the government game, by collecting bets and then paying out winnings based on the numbers drawn by Peryahan Games.

Peryahan Games allots 30 percent of its revenue to charity, of which 5 percent goes to the treasury of the municipal government and 2 percent to the provincial government, Aguilar said.

The PCSO is not required by its charter to secure permits from the host local government but it has to pay business permits for kiosks that house its cashiers, he said.