EDITORIAL — Undesirable aliens

According to a report in Philstar.com, a 29-year-old South Korean woman wanted back in her native country for allegedly being part of a massive illegal online gambling syndicate was arrested by the Bureau of Immigration recently.

The bureau said Kim Youngsun was arrested on the afternoon of August 7 in Barangay Buenavista I, General Trias, Cavite, following the issuance of an arrest warrant issued by the Incheon District Court last April for allegedly establishing and operating an illegal online gambling platform, and the issuance of a Red Notice against her by the Interpol last June.

The same report has South Korean authorities claiming that Kim served as an assistant manager of a support team and oversaw operational units involved in 23 illegal online gambling websites run from various offices in Pasay City and Quezon City starting in November 2018 yet.

She reportedly entered the country in 2025 and no longer left.

We thought we had seen the last of such illegal gambling activities but it turns out we were wrong.

Kim herself seems like an unlikely suspect; at such a young age a Korean woman entering the Philippines would seem to everyone like just another tourist here to enjoy the country, and not actually be a high-level manager for an illegal enterprise.

And that’s where it can become confusing.

How do we tell between those foreigners who are here to enjoy our tourist attractions and those foreigners who are here to set up a criminal enterprise?

As we have said before, while we should strive to make our country attractive to foreign tourists, we should also strive to make it unattractive to foreign criminals who want to come here to hide from the law or, worse, expand their criminal enterprise.

Ideally, that should include the detection of criminals already coming in. The longer criminals spend time here the more damage they are likely to do.

The fact that Kim seems to have just recently taken over an operation that’s been running for almost 10 years now may indicate that others have been in her “position” before.