A Philippine government news site is serving cloaked gambling pages to Google

The pages sit on pna.gov.ph, the website of the Philippines’ state news agency, spread across six URL patterns that don’t exist anywhere in the site’s normal structure, among them /casinoet/ and /jackpots/. They carry headlines built for search traffic rather than readers, things like “gambling slots” and “jili 178 register login,” and they’re credited to a real PNA correspondent, Ruth Abbey Gita-Carlos, with publish dates of September 27 and 28.

Anyone who clicks through from Google News gets a 404. The pages only render for requests that identify themselves as Google’s crawler, the same cloaking technique that has turned up before in schemes built to push gambling traffic through otherwise legitimate-looking domains. Each page found this way used PNA’s own template and byline formatting, wrapped around generic text about verifying accounts and paying through GCash or Maya, standard advice dressed up as news rather than actual reporting.

None of the pages carried outbound links, but a “related articles” module tied them together around specific Philippine casino brands, JILI 178, 55BMW, PHWin, 747 Live, Money88, and SZ777, with one image carrying a watermark for a separate operator, OKGames. Google’s own autocomplete for the domain surfaces several more brand names, including Vavada, Champion, Gama, Olimp, Pin, and TOTO, though no matching pages for those have turned up yet.

None of this shows up in regular Google search results, only in the Google News feed, and a genuine PNA article checked the same way came back clean, meaning the cloaking is scoped to specific pages rather than baked into the whole site. Whether the agency’s system was compromised or a contributor’s account was misused hasn’t been established, and PNA hasn’t issued a public statement addressing the pages as of this writing.