Never has ₱4.28 million been spent so generously on buying an entire fanbase a gambling habit.
Praise the phones, the hundred boxes stacked like an offering. React with a heart, then type the same comment everyone else is typing, “penge naman ng color black, Ma’am Ivana,” and watch it disappear into a thread of million requests.
Marvel at the sheer spectacle of someone spending millions in a single afternoon because, after all, that is exactly what it was built to do.
But if we are only going to talk about what was given, it is just as necessary to ask what was quietly being asked in return.
A gesture meant to read as a thank you to millions of followers who have stayed loyal through years of content has instead become the clearest illustration of how easily generosity can be rented out to an industry that profits from other people’s desperation.
More than a year after Casino Plus signed its first celebrity ambassador, you would think Filipinos might have grown sharper about spotting the pattern by now — but no.
Instead, judging by how quickly this video crossed a hundred million views and by how many comments poured in with people naming their favorite color, it seems that the online casino is running the exact same pattern it started with Julia Barretto in 2024.
How does a hundred iPhones worth P85,000 a piece still make room for an invitation to follow an online gambling platform’s page? How does a brand that markets itself around responsible gaming still need a giveaway of this scale to keep growing its following?
And how many people in the comments are reacting out of genuine excitement because a five-digit phone would actually make a difference in their lives, where receiving one means not having to choose between paying a bill and buying themselves a gift this month?
These questions carry a special weight in this country because the numbers behind them are no longer speculative.
With close to half its working-age population now registered on some betting or casino apps, the Philippines has already overtaken Singapore as Asia’s second-largest gambling market after Macau. A growth that these platforms spend years building and the exact currency this giveaway is spending — one familiar face at a time.
Days after the giveaway went viral, the Creator and Influencer Council of the Philippines (CICP) weighed in, stating that gambling endorsements deserve a heightened degree of caution and responsibility since creators need to reckon with the real-world impact of what they choose to promote.
For someone like Ivana Alawi, whose name and brand are attached to helping those in need, this lands differently than it might for anyone else.
Because now, it is attached to an industry that manufactures the very desperation she has spent years appearing to ease. With a following this massive, she cannot claim to not know the weight her endorsements carry.
Using poverty as a marketing hook to sell gambling is a new low, even for an industry that has never had much shame to begin with.
Profiting off people’s struggles while indulging them toward a bet is exploitation dressed up as generosity, and it is difficult to think of a more cynical use of a celebrity’s goodwill than turning it into bait for the very people least able to absorb the loss.
You cannot fight poverty with one hand and hand out the thing that deepens it with the other.
One might even argue that gambling is a personal matter between a person and their own choices, that nobody is forcing anyone to download an app or place a bet, so whatever happens afterward is solely on the person who chose to play.
It is a comforting argument, but an app engineered to keep a person logged in one bet longer is not a neutral tool waiting for a free choice to happen to it. Neither is a beloved celebrity’s face attached to that app.
None of this, though, means the rest of us are powerless in the meantime.
You do not need a massive following to have influence. Scroll past instead of engaging, report instead of reacting, and say something instead of staying quiet. These are not grand gestures, no, but if we cannot solve the problem, the least we can do is refuse to feed it.
A hundred phones will find their way to a hundred lucky winners and the platform will go on exactly as it intended. Somewhere, though, a hundred more habits are just getting started.
That has always been the house’s real game; it does not need to win big once. It only needs everyone else to keep playing, a hundred times over.
Ashlee Castro is the Features Editor of The Angelite for Publication Year 2026–2027 and writes opinions under the column “Ashen.”
The views and opinion of the editor does not necessarily reflect those of the publication.
