Eli San Fernando Exposes Pagcor Influencer Accountability Gap

What It Means

• Eli San Fernando’s questions at the House budget hearing surfaced a Pagcor influencer accountability gap that a company fine cannot fix.
• Pagcor fined Casino Plus one million pesos over an unauthorized promotion tied to Ivana Alawi, but the fine touched the company, not the endorser.
• Pagcor chair Alejandro Tengco admitted the agency has no direct authority over individual influencers, only over its own licensees.
• Enforcement against endorsers runs through DICT, NTC, and CICC instead, a slower and less certain path than a direct fine.
• Every gambling operator running an influencer campaign now knows the full cost of a violation lands on them alone.

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Eli San Fernando did not just ask a question at Monday’s House Committee on Appropriations hearing on Pagcor’s proposed 2027 budget. He exposed a Pagcor influencer accountability gap that the agency itself has never been able to close, and got Pagcor chair Alejandro Tengco to confirm it on record.

The Pagcor influencer accountability problem is simple to state and hard to fix. Pagcor can fine the gambling company that hires an influencer. It cannot fine the influencer. The exchange that surfaced this started with a disclosure. Tengco told the committee his agency fined Casino Plus one million pesos after the company backed Ivana Alawi’s giveaway of 100 high end phones, worth more than four million pesos combined, without seeking Pagcor’s permission first. Tengco called it a stern warning. San Fernando, representing Kamanggagawa party-list, pushed past the disclosure and asked the question that mattered: what happens to the influencer.

Pagcor’s Authority Stops At The License

Tengco’s answer revealed the actual shape of the Pagcor influencer accountability gap. Pagcor can penalize Casino Plus because Casino Plus holds a Pagcor license. The agency’s jurisdiction runs through that license, and nowhere else. An individual content creator promoting a gambling platform sits entirely outside that reach, no matter how central their role in the campaign.

“We don’t have police power,” Tengco told the committee, adding that the agency’s only option is to refer names to DICT, NTC, and CICC for possible action. That admission, drawn out by San Fernando’s follow up, is the clearest public statement yet that Pagcor’s enforcement tool only ever reaches half the transaction.

The company that hires an influencer absorbs the fine. The influencer who reaches the audience, drives the giveaway, and keeps the fee walks away from the same violation with no direct consequence from the regulator that oversees the industry.

The Fine Size Barely Registers Against The Campaign

One million pesos sounds substantial until it sits next to the four million pesos Casino Plus already spent on phones for the giveaway. Even after the fine, the company likely still comes out ahead on reach and attention generated by the promotion, especially with a name as recognizable as Alawi’s attached to it.

That math is not unique to this case. It is baked into how the Pagcor influencer accountability gap interacts with influencer marketing generally. A fine that lands only on the operator, and lands below the marketing value the campaign generated, does not change behavior. It becomes a line item, priced in before the campaign launches.

Smaller operators without Casino Plus’s scale face a sharper version of the same exposure. A one million peso fine is a rounding error for a large platform and a serious hit for a smaller one, yet both face identical rules with no mechanism reaching the influencer either way.

San Fernando’s Pagcor Influencer Accountability Question Became An Admission

What separates this exchange from years of general concern about gambling influencers is that San Fernando did not let the fine disclosure stand as the full answer. He asked Tengco directly what mechanisms exist to hold influencers accountable, and Tengco’s response put the Pagcor influencer accountability gap on record rather than leaving it as something everyone in the industry already understood but nobody in government had confirmed out loud.

Tengco noted his agency coordinates with the Department of Information and Communications Technology, the National Telecommunications Commission, and the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center to build cases against influencers who promote illegal platforms. That is a real channel, but it is also a recommendation channel, not a direct enforcement one. Pagcor flags a name. Another agency decides what, if anything, happens next.

Tengco added that many influencers and content creators have already dropped gambling endorsements and shifted toward legal operators, which suggests some deterrent effect exists even without direct Pagcor authority. But that shift happened alongside public pressure and reputational risk, not because Pagcor itself could act against them.

The Gap Now Has A Name Attached To It

Before Monday, the Pagcor influencer accountability gap was a known pattern, visible in every unpunished endorsement deal and every fine that stopped at the company level. After Monday, it is a specific admission from Pagcor’s own chairperson, extracted by a specific line of questioning from a sitting representative.

Every future budget hearing on Pagcor now carries that admission into the room. Any operator weighing an influencer partnership already knows where the full financial and regulatory weight lands if the promotion goes wrong. It lands on them, every time, regardless of who reached the audience or who kept the fee. The Pagcor influencer accountability gap does not close on its own, and nothing said Monday changes who absorbs the cost next.

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