Wholesale deceit
The strange saga of Alice Guo—in which a Chinese national was able to acquire fake Filipino citizenship and construct a fake Filipino background, allowing her to rise to a position of power in the country’s politics and society—always led to an unsettling question: How many more Alice Guos were there?
She could not have been a one-off thing. The relative ease with which Guo was able to assemble fraudulent citizenship papers and pass herself off as a Filipino for years meant that the template was, at the very least, replicable.
If it worked for her—at least until she was found out, and accidentally at that when the Pogo (Philippine offshore gaming operator) hub she had backstopped in Bamban, Tarlac as the town’s mayor was raided for illegal activities—then surely the scheme would have been tried by others.
Businessman Joseph Sy, for instance—could he be Alice Guo 2.0? In August last year, the then chair of mining company Global Ferronickel Holdings Inc. was arrested at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) by the Bureau of Immigration (BI) upon arriving from Hong Kong. Sy supposedly had questionable Philippine citizenship papers, and his fingerprints matched those of a Chinese national named Chen Zhong Zhen. The BI and the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) both called out red flags in Sy’s Philippine passport and birth registration documents.
Hallmarks of fraud
How was that possible? Sy had risen to such a prominent position in the business community that his arrest was publicly denounced by the country’s leading mining groups as nothing less than “illegal detention.” It “sends a chilling signal to the business and investment community,” warned the Chamber of Mines of the Philippines, which, along with the Philippine Nickel Industry Association, stoutly asserted Sy’s innocence. In 2018, the tycoon had even been made a member of the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) Auxiliary Squadron with the rank of rear admiral, so his stature before this point seemed beyond question.
Sy was detained for months by the BI before the Supreme Court ordered his release last October on a P900,000 bond. Just last week, he snubbed the Senate panel on justice and human rights that was looking into his case, claiming sickness that required him to be taken to the emergency room. Perhaps he merely did not want to be confronted at the hearing, because what the PSA bared before the Senate committee chaired by Sen. Risa Hontiveros was highly damaging to his case: Sy, according to the PSA, appears to have acquired through late registration a birth certificate that bears the hallmarks of fraud.
National security
PSA Legal Services Director Eliezer Ambatali testified that Sy’s baptismal certificate did not exist and his parents had no records at the civil registry, “whether it’s a certificate of live birth, certificate of marriage, or certificate of death.”
As for Sy’s fingerprints? BI Deputy Commissioner Joel Alejandro Nacnac confirmed that they indeed matched those of Chinese national Chen Zhong Zhen.
What to make of all this—except to reach the dispiriting conclusion that yet another foreign national had been able to deceive the country and make a mockery of its laws that easily, with Sy having risen to great heights unimpeded while his murky background remained concealed all these years? Hontiveros was right to express shock during the hearing: It took 36 years before Sy’s deception was exposed. In the meantime, the fact that Sy, a Chinese national, had successfully ingratiated himself with the PCG—the institution at the forefront of the country’s struggle for territorial sovereignty against China in the West Philippine Sea—makes that duplicity all the more suspect, with alarming implications for the country’s national security.
Sham Filipino citizenship
These cases could only be the result of the wanton sale of sham Filipino citizenship papers to thousands of foreign nationals during the Duterte administration—up to 1,200 Chinese by the local civil registry of Santa Cruz, Davao del Sur, beginning in 2016, according to the National Bureau of Investigation; and “over 50,000 potentially fraudulent birth records” issued, per PSA’s own count.
Last Sunday, another Chinese national was in the news: Yao Shucheng was arrested at Naia for using an authentic Philippine passport obtained with a fraudulent birth certificate. He had passed himself off as a Filipino named King Agbulos Lee—the very same modus of Wang Xiujun, a Chinese businesswoman nabbed at the airport in July 2025 for, what else, posing as a Filipino named Cassi Palma Poliquit by virtue of bogus Philippine papers.
Fake Filipinos represent a dangerous risk the country cannot afford to shrug off. Foreign nationals who violate the country’s citizenship and civil registry laws must be dealt with forcefully and decisively, along with the networks and officials that enable the wholesale deceit—or we will have more Alice Guos, Joseph Sys, and their like to contend with.
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