Our team: meet the named Philippine gambling experts
Our team consists of five named Philippine specialists — PAGCOR's chairman, a senator, a retired PNP general, a Responsible Gaming leader, and a psychiatrist — who research, write and review every article on this site.
Our team is the editorial backbone of this site — five named, qualified specialists who research, write, and review every article published here. We are not anonymous, and we are not AI. Each member brings a specific, verifiable area of expertise: gambling regulation, Philippine gaming law and legislation, scam and fraud prevention, Responsible Gaming, and addiction and mental-health care. This page introduces each of them: photo, biography, specialization on this site, and links to verify their credentials against public records.
You deserve to know exactly who stands behind a casino review, a Responsible Gaming guide, or a legal explainer — especially when that content touches money, law, and habits that can affect your wellbeing. Every article carries a named author whose public record you can check.
Table of contents
- Why our team is named and qualified
- Meet our team
- How we build and check our team’s work
- How to contact the team
- Frequently asked questions
- Conclusion
Why our team is named and qualified
Gambling content — casino reviews, gaming law explainers, Responsible Gaming guides — falls into what Google and the broader industry classify as “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) territory. The stakes are concrete: a player relying on unqualified advice may lose money, access illegal platforms, or fail to find help for a gambling problem in time. That means the standard for author credibility on this site is not a job title we created ourselves — it is a documented, publicly verifiable track record in the relevant field.
We do not publish under pen names, fictional bylines, or bare “editorial team” credits. Every article is attributed to a real person whose qualifications you can confirm through official institutional pages, reputable media, or professional bodies. Their credentials are also exposed in the page’s structured schema data via sameAs links so search engines and quality reviewers can verify them independently — not just take our word for it.
Our coverage spans five distinct domains, and each is handled by the specialist who writes only within their lane: general editorial and gambling guides, gaming law and regulation, player safety and scam prevention, Responsible Gaming, and addiction and mental-health care. No crossover, no guesswork. For the editorial code the team follows, see our Editorial Guidelines and Fact-checking page. The team is also introduced on the About Us and Authors pages.
Meet our team
The five members below cover every subject area the site publishes. Each entry leads with the credential that makes the member trustworthy for their domain — their real-world role, not an editorial title we assigned.
| Team member | Role / credential | Specialization on this site |
|---|---|---|
| Alejandro H. Tengco | Chairman & CEO, PAGCOR (since Aug 2022) | General editorial and gambling guides |
| Erwin Tulfo | Senator; Chair, Senate Committee on Games and Amusement | Gambling law, regulation and policy |
| Benjamin C. Acorda Jr. | Executive Director, PAOCC; former Chief of PNP | Scam and fraud prevention, player safety |
| Andy Tsui | President & Director, DigiPlus Interactive Corp. | Responsible Gaming |
| Dr. Cornelio G. Banaag Jr. | Professor Emeritus, UP College of Medicine | Gambling addiction and mental health |
Alejandro H. Tengco — General editorial
Role: Chairman and CEO of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) since 23 August 2022. Lead author and editorial head of this site.
Alejandro “Al” H. Tengco spent decades in construction (Nationstar Development Corporation), telecommunications (PLDT), and local public service as Vice Mayor of Malolos before taking on the most visible regulatory role in Philippine gambling. Under his leadership, PAGCOR cut online licence fees from 50–55% down to 30% of gross gaming revenue — a reduction that expanded the legal online market from under 10% to over 50% of total market share within three years. He oversaw the wind-down of Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) and played a key part in the Philippines’ removal from the FATF grey list in February 2025. PAGCOR recorded ₱410 billion in GGR in 2024, the highest in the corporation’s history. He was named Executive of the Year at the Global Gaming Awards Asia-Pacific 2024 and has keynoted every major regional industry conference, from ICE Barcelona to SiGMA Asia.
What he covers: General gambling guides, editorial oversight, regulatory explainers, and site-wide content direction.
Erwin Tulfo — Law, regulation and policy
Role: Senator of the Republic of the Philippines (20th Congress, since June 2025); Chairperson of the Senate Committee on Games and Amusement.
Erwin Tulfo has been the central legislative voice in the Philippines’ online-gambling debate since mid-2025. As Chair of the Senate Committee on Games and Amusement, he leads Senate hearings on iGaming regulation, examines the roles of PAGCOR, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, and e-wallet platforms in player protection, and is directly shaping the legislative framework governing online gambling in the country. Before his election to the Senate in May 2025, where he received over 17 million votes and placed 4th, he served as Secretary of Social Welfare and Development in 2022 and anchored national primetime news programmes for over two decades — including TV Patrol, Aksyon, and Ulat Bayan.
What he covers: Philippine gambling law, PAGCOR regulation, legislative developments, and policy analysis.
Verify on Senate.gov.ph | Wikipedia
Benjamin C. Acorda Jr. — Scam and fraud prevention
Role: Executive Director of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC), rank of Undersecretary, since 16 October 2025. Retired PNP General; 29th Chief of the Philippine National Police (April 2023–March 2024). Pioneer of the PNP Anti-Cybercrime Group.
General Acorda spent 33 years in the Philippine National Police, rising from municipal stations in Ilocos Norte and Pangasinan to command the force as its 29th Chief under President Marcos. He is among the founding members of the PNP Anti-Cybercrime Group. Since October 2025, as Executive Director of PAOCC, he has overseen large-scale rescue operations targeting scam centres, signed standard operating procedures with UNODC in April 2026 to combat online fraud networks, and coordinated inter-agency prosecutions of illegal offshore gambling operators. By January 2026, PAOCC under his leadership had logged 47,446 complaints about illegal online lending applications alone — a scale that reflects the breadth of the threat Filipino players face.
What he covers: Identifying illegal and offshore gambling sites, scam-avoidance guides, account security, and player protection from fraud.
Andy Tsui — Responsible Gaming
Role: President and Director of DigiPlus Interactive Corp. (operator of BingoPlus, ArenaPlus, and GameZone) since October 2021; Chairman of DigiPlus Foundation (formerly BingoPlus Foundation).
Andy Tsui (Tsui Kin Ming) trained as an accountant at Baruch College in New York and built a career in gaming finance across Hong Kong and Macau before moving to the Philippines. At DigiPlus, he oversaw the January 2022 launch of BingoPlus — the first PAGCOR-licensed online bingo platform in the country — and has since led the company’s growth into the Philippines’ largest PAGCOR-licensed digital entertainment operator. He chairs DigiPlus Foundation, the industry’s most active Responsible Gaming initiative, and in 2026 joined the Philippine Senate’s technical working group drafting new iGaming sector legislation. He is the most prominent industry voice on Responsible Gaming standards in the Philippines today.
What he covers: Responsible Gaming standards, PAGCOR self-exclusion programmes, player protection tools, and the regulatory framework for digital gaming.
Dr. Cornelio G. Banaag Jr. — Addiction and mental health (in memoriam)
Role: Professor Emeritus, University of the Philippines College of Medicine; former President, Philippine Mental Health Association; Technical Advisor to the WHO Programme on Substance Abuse, Geneva. Widely known as the “Father of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the Philippines.”
Dr. Banaag dedicated more than six decades to psychiatry in the Philippines. He established the first formal child psychiatry training programme in the country, served as a WHO technical advisor in Geneva on substance-abuse programmes, and was a founding mentor of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Section at the Philippine Children’s Medical Center. After his fellowship at Worcester Youth Guidance Center in Massachusetts, he gave up a U.S. green card and returned home to build the discipline from scratch — a decision that shaped psychiatric care in the Philippines for generations. His 1997 book Resiliency: Stories Found in Philippine Streets (UNICEF Philippines) remains a landmark reference in the field. Dr. Banaag passed away on 27 March 2026, aged 90. His work on gambling addiction and behavioural harm reduction remains a foundational authority on this site, and his contributions are cited in memoriam.
What he covered: Gambling addiction, behavioural harm reduction, and the mental-health consequences of problem gambling.
How we build and check our team’s work
Every member of our team is named, operates within a documented area of expertise, and holds a verifiable public record in their field. That is not a credential we issue ourselves — it is an independently checkable standard.
In practice, this means three things. First, articles are attributed to the specialist for that domain: a Responsible Gaming article is not written by a law expert, and a legal explainer is not produced by someone without a track record in gaming regulation. Lane discipline is non-negotiable. Second, every factual claim is verified against primary sources — official PAGCOR records, Philippine Senate records, peer-reviewed psychiatric literature, and verified media — before publication. The full verification process is described on our Fact-checking page. Third, the team operates to PAGCOR-aligned standards: all content observes the minimum legal age of 21 and uses the mandated term “Responsible Gaming” throughout.
Editorial decisions — which topics to cover, how to frame sensitive subjects, when to revise published content — are governed by the code set out in our Editorial Guidelines. If you spot an error or a gap, the next section tells you how to reach us.
How to contact the team
We welcome corrections, questions, and suggestions from readers, journalists, and regulators alike. If you have found a factual error in any article, want to propose a topic, or are a subject-matter expert interested in contributing, please reach us through our Contact page.
For faster responses in the Philippines, Facebook Messenger is the most reliable channel — 84.2% of Filipino internet users are on Messenger, and you will find us on the site’s official Facebook page. All confirmed corrections are handled in line with the process in our Editorial Guidelines and noted in the article’s revision history.
Frequently asked questions
Conclusion
Every article on this site is written or reviewed by a named, qualified member of our team — a specialist whose credentials you can verify through public records, not a generic editorial voice or an anonymous algorithm. The five members introduced above represent five distinct domains of expertise, each essential to this site’s mission: giving Filipino players accurate, trustworthy information about online gambling, gaming law, Responsible Gaming, and player safety.
We invite you to read each member’s full profile, check their credentials, and contact us if you have a question or have found an error. Accountability is not a policy we adopted for appearances — it is the reason our team is named.
Must be 21 years or older to play. Gambling is intended for entertainment only. Gambling can be addictive — play responsibly. If you or someone you know needs support, contact GA Philippines at gamblersanonymous.ph (0917-509-4080) or the National Center for Mental Health (NCMH) at (02) 8531-9001. PAGCOR Self-Exclusion is available at pagcor.ph/regulatory/exclusion2.php.