OFWs told: Beware of agencies with canceled, suspended licenses

Overseas Filipino workers (OFW) should be wary of recruitment agencies that are still operating despite having their licenses suspended or canceled, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) warned Monday. "The (POEA) advises the public to be wary of recruitment agencies with canceled or suspended licenses that are still actively recruiting for overseas jobs," the agency said in an advisory. It has canceled the licenses of 451 recruitment agencies since the start of its operations and placed 44 others under preventive suspension. From 2008 until the first eight months of 2009 alone, the POEA had canceled 74 operating licenses and suspended or fined 22 agencies due to recruitment violations. To verify the status of a certain agency, you may log on here. Earlier, the Task Force Against Illegal Recruitment (Tfair) named the suspected illegal recruiters with the most number of pending warrants of arrest. Senior Superintendent Gilbert Sosa, Tfair operations chief, said that at least 276 Filipinos have a total of more than 20,000 unserved warrants of arrest for large-scale illegal recruitment. Of the 276 suspects, 68 have double digit warrants of arrests. But Sosa had also told GMANews.TV earlier that they have already narrowed down these arrests after the task force conducted several back-to-back entrapment operations. Sosa, who is also from the Philippine National Police’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, said they plan to come up with a list of the top 50 most wanted persons in large-scale illegal recruitment and seek public help in rounding them up. Based on statistics supplied by the non-government organization Initiatives for Dialogue and Empowerment through Alternative Legal Services (Ideals), there were 1,662 confirmed victims of illegal recruitment from January to November 2008, an increase of four percent from 1,539 during the same period in 2007. According to the POEA, a total of 1, 236, 013 Filipinos were deployed in 2008 – with Saudi Arabia still as the top destination for OFWs with 275, 933 deployed there. - Kimberly Jane T. Tan, GMANews.TV