THE Bureau of Immigration (BI) said its officers at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) stopped from leaving the country on Tuesday, two Filipino women who confessed that they were illegal recruited to work abroad.
In a report to Immigration Commissioner Norman Tansingco, the BI’s Immigration Protection and Border Enforcement Section (I-PROBES) said the two passengers were intercepted at the NAIA Terminal 3 before they could board an Air Asia flight to Kuala Lumpur.
The I-PROBES personnel, who interviewed the two women, said the victims initially claimed to be officemates in an Information Technology (IT) networking company and presented documents claiming such.
They, however, eventually confessed that the employment documents they presented are spurious, and that these were only given to them by their recruiters whom they only met on Facebook.
They added that each of them paid their recruiters Php 75,000 in return for processing their documents to work in Paris.
They were later turned over to the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (IACAT) for investigation and filing of charges against their illegal recruiters.
Reacting to the incident, Tansingco again warned would-be overseas workers to avoid “shortcuts” and not to deal with illegal recruiters, instead of going through the legal process of securing the appropriate overseas work permits from the government.
He said victims of illegal recruiters are always at the losing end as many of them, who were promised lucrative jobs abroad, end up returning to the Philippines empty-handed after being abandoned by their handlers.
“Don’t gamble your lifelong savings by falling prey to these unscrupulous people whose only motives are to earn money at your expense,” Tansingco warned.
