Philippines Cracks Down On Rising 'Mail-Order Bride' Scams, Warns Against Fake Marriages

The Philippines' Bureau of Immigration (BI) has issued a warning to the public about the resurgence of“mail-order bride” schemes. This comes after a Filipina woman was recently stopped from leaving the country for China, where she was set to enter into an arranged marriage with a Chinese man, according to inquirer .

“The mail-order bride trap is rising again - all promise(s) upfront, tricking women into fake marriages and exploiting them as domestic workers with little or no pay,” BI Commissioner Joel Anthony Viado said in a statement.

The BI reported that on July 15, personnel from its Immigration Protection and Border Enforcement Section (I-Probes) stopped a 24-year-old woman at Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia). She had been preparing to board a Xiamen Airlines flight to Xiamen, China.

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The woman initially told immigration officers she was travelling with her brother to reunite with her Chinese husband, whom she claimed to have recently married. However, authorities noticed irregularities in the documents she submitted.

“The marriage certificate showed a visibly altered date, and the marriage license was issued after the wedding - raising serious inconsistencies,” the I-Probes said in its report.

After further questioning, the woman admitted that both the marriage and the documents she carried were "fake". She revealed that a recruiter had promised her an improved quality of life in exchange for agreeing to the arranged marriage. She had already received P8,000 (Dh500) from the man she was supposed to marry, to cover her travel expenses.

The BI said the woman and the man posing as her brother were handed over to the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking under the Department of Justice for additional investigation and support.

This isn't the first such incident this year. The BI previously intercepted two Filipino women in their early 20s at Naia who also claimed they were headed to China to join their Chinese husbands. Although they said they had been married for some time, inconsistencies in their statements led I-Probes to discover that both weddings happened on the same day and at the same hour.

Eventually, the two women confessed that their marriage was "fake". It was also revealed that two additional women are also being wed to Chinese men during the same arranged ceremony, with all paperwork facilitated by an unidentified third party.

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