Police uncover clandestine hospitals offering new faces to criminals

Underground hospitals in the Philippines have been offering criminals plastic surgery so they can change their appearance and evade arrest, according to the BBC.

Filipino authorities told the BBC that they already raided one such hospital in the Manila suburb of Pasay in May(shown). In July 2024, they said that two other hospitals—believed to be four times larger—may be shut down in the coming weeks.

Image: PTV/Facebook

In an age of digital surveillance, the hospitals were offering enough services for criminals or suspects to totally change their appearance. Police seized hair transplant tools, dental implants, and skin whitening IV drips from the Pasay hospital. “You can create an entirely new person out of those,” Presidential Anti-Organised Crime Commission (PAOCC) spokesman Winston John Casio told This Week in Asia.

During the raid on the Pasay hospital, authorities arrested two Vietnamese doctors, one Chinese doctor, a Chinese pharmacist, and a Vietnamese nurse. None of them were licensed to practice medicine in the Philippines as foreign professionals. Likewise, the hospitals had no permits.

According to the BBC, the clients of these hospitals tend to be those related to the controversial Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator (POGO) sector, catering mostly to the Chinese market, where betting is illegal. Politicians in the Philippines have been pushing to ban POGOs in recent months, citing the sector’s links to a string of criminal activities, including scams and human trafficking, the South China Morning Post reports.

In May, Philippine police rescued 383 Filipinos, 202 Chinese, and 73 other foreign nationals who were forced to work for an online scam firm masquerading as an online gaming organization, according to the BBC. The workers were lured in for legitimate jobs but forced to work in criminal activity. The workers have alleged torture and inhuman treatment once there.

You may not have heard of this practice, but a UN report released last August estimated that hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have been trafficked to Southeast Asia to run online scams. The racket picked up significantly during the pandemic lockdowns when people were easier to scam online.

The South China Morning Post suggests that the underground hospitals offer other services to fugitives, undocumented workers, and others linked to the shady industry.

In 2022, immigration authorities nabbed a suspected member of the Chinese mafia, who had allegedly undergone plastic surgery to evade being caught, according to this week. Authorities now believe the suspect had surgery in one of these underground hospitals.

While large-scale hospitals of this kind are indeed a novelty, criminals opting to make themselves unrecognizable is not new, nor is it limited to the Philippines. One famous example is the Mexican drug lord Amado Carrillo (shown), who died in 1997 after undergoing extensive plastic surgery to change his appearance. At the time of his death, his fortune was estimated to be around $25 billion, according to the Washington Post.

Image: Amado Carrillo mugshot / Amado727 / Wikipedia

The practice was also depicted in a 1947 American film noir, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The story follows Bogart’s character, who escapes from San Quentin Prison and eventually undergoes plastic surgery to avoid being caught.

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