CEBU CITY – Lapu-Lapu City lone district Rep. Junard “Ahong” Chan was offered a whopping P300,000 to promote an online gambling platform.
The offer could have been irresistible to some, but the neophyte lawmaker answered with a ‘big no!’
“Big no! When I woke up this morning, we were greeted with an invitation to promote online gambling. It's an automatic ‘no’ for me because we know that some lives were destroyed because of gambling. Never mind that monthly P300,000 offer,” Chan said in a Facebook post.
Chan is active on social media, sharing his activities when he was still the mayor of Lapu-Lapu and now the city’s representative in the Congress.
He has 915,000 followers on Facebook.
“We’ve been following your incredible growth – almost 1 million views and counting! We’d love to collaborate with you,” read the invite that Chan shared on Facebook.
“We’re offering P300,000 per month, starting immediately, in exchange for regular promotion and integration of our eGames content into your posts,” the post added.
Apart from turning down the offer, Chan also urged his constituents to avoid gambling,
Chan said he heard stories about families being ruined by gambling as money intended for family needs were instead used to gamble.
“I appeal to the Oponganons to please prioritize our responsibilities. Every centavo of our hard-earned money should be spent for our families and not for gambling. I highly discourage everyone to avoid gambling because it has already destroyed lives,” Chan said.
Calls to ban online gambling have been mounting.
Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri has filed a bill that seeks outright ban on online gambling in the country.
The senator described online gambling as a “silent epidemic” affecting the majority of Filipinos, especially the youth.