📷 PCSO General Manager Melquiades A. Robles
The Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) warned the public on Friday, February 14, against a fake news report on social media, claiming that an obscure group of hackers hacked its database of lotto winners.
PCSO, through General Manager Mel Robles, stated its Facebook post after a Facebook post claimed that the personal information of lottery winners from 2016 to 2025 had been breached.
The said post allegedly revealed confidential details such as lotto winners’ names, addresses, phone numbers, identification numbers, and winning lottery numbers.
In the statement, Robles emphasized that no breach or hacking attempt occurred on the agency’s systems. He also assured the public that PCSO’s digital defenses remain secure and that no official sites or databases were compromised.
“This is fake news. There was no breach nor any successful attempt to hack the systems of PCSO. We have not reported anything to DICT because nothing had happened,” Robles said.
Robles dismissed the claims as an attempt by an alleged group of hackers to gain notoriety.
He clarified that the screenshots attached to the post, which supposedly showed compromised data, were related to email accounts of PCSO employees from the Cagayan Branch.
These emails contained a list of individuals who took advantage of a PCSO promo in March 2022, not the names of the lotto winners.
“The information published by the hackers [belongs] to the recipients of a promo of a branch in Cagayan in March of 2022 and not of lotto winners. Our database for the lotto jackpot winners is safe in the head office. The branch offices are not connected to the head office,” Robles said.
Robles further emphasized that PCSO’s systems have withstood numerous hacking attempts and remain impregnable.
“While there were numerous attempts (in the past) to hack our system coming from all over the world, our digital defenses are holding out and remain impregnable,” he said.
The PCSO chief reiterated that none of their accounts or websites were compromised, breached, or hacked. “I have just checked, at the moment, none of our websites are compromised, breached, or hacked,” he stressed.
The public is advised to remain vigilant and rely only on official statements from PCSO to avoid falling victim to fake news. (TCSP)
