Manila: On Tuesday, Philippine police announced that they had freed more than a thousand people who had allegedly been brought into the nation illegally to work for a Manila-based online casino.
Police raided buildings inside a compound in the capital on Monday night, finding people who were of Chinese, Vietnamese, Singaporean, and Malaysian nationality among the others.

The alleged victims, according to the police, accepted jobs offered on Facebook to work in the Philippines as "assistants in online gaming."

Internet scams in the Asia-Pacific region, frequently staffed by trafficking victims duped or forced into promoting fraudulent cryptocurrency investments, have drawn increasing attention from around the world.

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Two police buses and two police trucks were parked outside the compound, according to AFP reporters on the scene on Tuesday. They couldn't go inside the structures.

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After the raid, Michelle Sabino, a spokeswoman for the Philippine National Police's anti-cybercrime unit, told reporters that "this is initially a case of human trafficking."

She promised an investigation into everything, including the employees' potential involvement in online scams.

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More than a thousand people from various Asian countries who had been trafficked into the Philippines, held captive, and made to operate online scams were rescued by authorities in May.