From Code to Cockpits: The Mystery That Took Me Off Script
Back when I was still living in Laguna, during the early days of the company’s startup push, I worked closely with a colleague named Joshua. He was a former QA who eventually transitioned into a business analyst role, and out of all the people I worked with remotely, we ended up building a strong friendship. That kind of friendship born out of mutual exhaustion.
We were the usual suspects left in those late afternoon Google Meet calls that somehow stretched way beyond office hours. Not because we were lazy, but because the system we were part of—the product, the pipeline, the work culture -never really made sense. We were officially on flex time, which meant “freedom” in theory but, in practice, most of us were clocked in by 7AM, some a bit later at 8 or 9AM and somehow still there long past the time we were supposed to stop at 4 or 5PM.
And to make things worse, we weren’t even using normal tools like Slack or Zoom. No. We were on Lark. The kind of platform that’s somehow both bloated and broken. It tried so hard to be everything -chat, calendar, docs, video, HRMS, karaoke night, but ended up feeling like a Frankenstein of SaaS mediocrity. Meetings would crash, audio would desync, and messages would disappear into the void. It was like working inside an app that forgot it was supposed to be helpful.
Still, within that weird chaos, people bonded.
Joshua and I shared the same kind of overtime silence. The kind where everyone’s mics are off, but you know no one has eaten dinner yet. That strange post-deployment moment where you're just waiting for staging to stop spitting 500 errors. And during one of those hollow silences, I asked him something completely off-topic:
“Hey… have you seen this? The story about the missing sabungeros?”
He blinked. “What?”
I dropped him a video I had just watched. It was an early news segment, maybe a clip from 24 Oras or some raw footage compilation posted to Facebook. It covered the disappearance of several men allegedly involved in online sabong, cockfighting that had exploded digitally during the pandemic. The video showed CCTV footage: men walking into cockpits and not walking out. Others were last seen being escorted into vans, never to be heard from again.
It’s near our area, right?” I asked.
He paused. “Wait, seriously? That’s near us?”
We both lived in Laguna at the time. And while the videos never exactly said Sta. Rosa, they might as well have. That’s how eerily familiar the roads, signage, and background chatter looked. But as it turns out—no, they weren’t even Sta. Rosa. Just somewhere in Laguna. And that made it worse. Because it wasn’t there. It was everywhere.
And that was when it started.
From Curiosity to Compulsion
photo from https://remate.ph/kaso-ng-missing-sabungeros-may-bagong-witness-doj/
We began following the story together. It started slow, just casual mentions in our Lark chats during backend build delays, or random screen shares of the latest sketchy clip from a cockpit parking lot. But eventually, it turned into something else. Something darker.
“Did you see that new CCTV?”
“Isn’t that near the Mercury Drug by Tagaytay road?”
“That looks like it’s one barangay over from where we used to get tapsilog.”
It was like watching a horror story filmed in a place you know.
Eventually, I sent him one of the first major breakdowns of the case, an episode of Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho (KMJS). It didn’t just show footage. It dug deeper. Interviews with families. Parents crying. Timelines. Suspicious bank activity. Silent phones. Suspiciously deleted accounts. Evidence that no one seemed to be treating as actual evidence.
That KMJS episode became a rabbit hole.
We would send each other every update we could find. Even long after he left the company, we kept sharing links, Facebook uploads, Twitter threads, Reddit conspiracies, treating it like a side project no one asked for but we couldn’t ignore.
Our third silent observer during those late Google Meet calls was Shane, a backend engineer with the kind of PHP wizardry that made everyone else’s code look like spaghetti. She wasn’t even from Laguna. Somewhere in Cebu or Davao, I could never remember exactly. But even she started watching the clips. Even she started asking questions.
Why this cockpit?
Why those people?
Why that van?
This wasn't just online sabong anymore. By the time the disappearances peaked, online cockfighting had already been declared illegal, but the cases kept happening. It had metastasized into something else. Something post-digital. As if the infrastructure had been dismantled but the system - the real system - was still running offline.
The Case That Refused to Be Solved
From 2021 to 2022, at least 34 men involved in sabong - online or otherwise - vanished. Some were in Metro Manila. Others in Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Bulacan. These weren’t remote barrios. These were well-populated, heavily monitored urban zones.
People disappeared from places with malls, CCTV, checkpoints, and daily foot traffic.
They were last seen in cockpits. In cars. Escorted by men in civilian clothing. Some footage captured broad daylight abductions that were somehow ignored despite being extremely clear in intent. Faces may have been blurred, but movement doesn’t lie. You don’t escort someone like that if they’re coming back.
Some families traced phone pings, only to see them cut off abruptly. Others noticed sudden withdrawals from GCash, or social media accounts logged out and never accessed again. A few men even told their families, “I don’t think I should go today, but I need the money.” They went anyway. They never came back.
To this day - zero convictions. Not one. There were Senate hearings. Public promises. Statements from high-ranking police officials. There was buzz. KMJS aired more segments. Social media stirred. And then, without fail… silence.
For a while, there was even talk that GMA had created a full-length documentary about the disappearances, possibly one of their deepest investigations into the sabungero case. But despite allegedly finishing production, the documentary never aired. No explanation. Just whispers. Then, KMJS started having “exclusive” interviews with key witnesses, including one going by the alias Totoy, possibly the same source meant for the shelved docu. The timing was... too neat. And very unsettling.
🕴️ Whispers of the Untouchables
Then came the names.
One of the most explosive allegations to date came in 2025, when a major witness stepped forward and pointed directly at Atong Ang, one of the most powerful and recognizable figures in the gambling and cockfighting scene. The witness didn’t just hint. He laid it all out: meetings, names, operations. And more than that, he claimed that powerful figures knew what was happening and did nothing.
Gretchen Barretto’s name popped up in online forums and speculation circles, not as a suspect necessarily, but as part of the social ecosystem connected to the gambling world. People wanted answers. Connections. Even hints. But all they got were clickbait headlines and cold trails.
The formula repeated itself:
A bombshell drops
The internet wakes up
Memes appear
People rage
And then…
Nothing.
When Systems Fail: A Developer’s Reflection on Data, Trust, and Infrastructure
As someone who has built digital systems - from eCommerce carts to API-integrated customer flows - I see everything through the lens of logic, auditability, and process integrity.
And that’s why this haunts me.
Because online sabong wasn’t done through smoke signals. It was digital. Online. Cashless. App-based. That means logs. That means IP addresses. That means payment trails.
In any of the systems I’ve worked on, especially for small-to-medium enterprises -we log everything. Why?
To trace transactions
To debug outages
To prevent fraud
To resolve disputes
To build trust
If a user disappears during a checkout flow, we track their session ID, browser type, IP address, cart contents, last-click event, referral source, and whether the confirmation email fired properly.
But in this case?
34 people vanished.
On digital platforms.
With transactions.
With phone numbers.
With account histories.
And there was no audit trail?
That’s not a bug.
That’s intentional.
Because if any developer built a system where 34 users vanished with no logs, no alerts, and no trace, they’d be fired. Or worse, audited into oblivion. But here? Somehow, we accepted silence.
Trust Is the First API That Fails
In development, we write for edge cases. We prepare for rollback. We monitor alerts. We invest in uptime, disaster recovery, and security audits. Why? Because people rely on us. Whether it’s an SME selling rice cookers or a SaaS billing platform, trust is everything.
But this sabungero case exposed something larger:
That when real lives go missing, the systems we take for granted -police, law, governance, don’t operate like our codebases.
There’s no version control.
No logs.
No support channel.
No rollback.
Just silence.
Final Thoughts: When Code Meets Conscience
What started as a quick YouTube video share after deployment turned into something much deeper.
A story I couldn’t shake.
A bond between colleagues.
A mystery that feels like a national null pointer exception.
This case didn’t just disturb me as a Filipino.
It disturbed me as a developer.
In tech, failure has a cost, but it also has accountability. Logs are forever. Actions have fingerprints. But here? The log files were either deleted, ignored, or forged and no one got fired.
So yeah, it was a random link.
Then a Lark DM.
Then another KMJS video.
Then the kind of obsession that you don’t debug your way out of.
Because when systems this public fail this badly, it’s not a conspiracy it’s a design flaw.
And if we keep letting it run in production?
We’re all going to crash.