17 newly-arrived Filipino workers in B.C. are speaking out and demanding government action after allegedly being trafficked by a fraudulent recruitment agency onto local farms and hotels. They say they are owed more than $2500 each in unpaid wages and thousands more in illegal fees collected by the recruiters.
The workers say they are left with little to nothing after two recruiters from Helping Hands Immigration Services (HHIS), Cherry May Ricafort and Vincent Macalipay, allegedly scammed them out of thousands of dollars in illegal fees and trafficked them into working at two Vancouver hotels and three farms in Keremeos, B.C.
Damayan Society for Migrant Education and Resources (Damayan BC) and Migrante B.C., a grassroots volunteer-led organization for Filipino migrants in British Columbia, are helping the 17 workers access temporary housing, transportation, food, legal support and translation services. They also helped organize the “Justice for HHIS 17” campaign.
The North Star attended a press conference held by the workers and their supporters. The press conference platformed the workers’ stories and led to more than a dozen other migrants coming forward with similar experiences.
Helping Hands Immigration Services
The Filipino workers originally came from Taiwan to Newfoundland and spent 4 months as seasonal seafood workers, hoping that working in Canada would be the key to changing their families’ lives. As Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs) tied to one boss on closed work permits, they were struggling to find employment for the rest of the year. One of their coworkers referred them to Ricafort and Macalipay in Vancouver.
The 17 say that, taking advantage of their lack of awareness as newcomers to Canada, the two recruiters lured them to working in B.C. with false promises of Labour Market Impact Assessments (LMIA) that would enable them to work legally in the province for two years. A LMIA is a document employers may need to hire foreign workers showing that no Canadian or permanent resident can fill their position.
The workers report that they were each directed to transfer between $5,000 and $8,000 to Ricafort’s personal bank account and the business account of Strive Employment and Labour Contractors Services Ltd.
After paying these initial fees charged by the recruiters, and their airfare from Newfoundland to Vancouver, they were split up. Some moved into accommodations provided by Cherry and Vincent. Others were sent directly to farms in Keremeos, a village in south-central B.C. located near Osoyoos and the United States border.
Exploitation in Vancouver hotels
Five of the workers were contracted by Cherry and Vincent to work as housekeepers in two separate hotels: the Best Western Plus Vancouver Airport Hotel and the Grand Park Hotel & Suites Downtown Vancouver. The Best Western, a 137 room 3-star hotel in Vancouver’s Marpole neighbourhood, and the Grand Park, a 141 room 4-star hotel in Vancouver’s Downtown, are listed as “Sister Properties” on the Grand Park’s website.
These workers were reportedly instructed by Cherry not to speak to either their coworkers or hotel management while they were reassured that their LMIA were being processed. After working at the hotels for about two weeks, they discovered that they were being paid just $7.50 per cleaned room instead of an hourly rate.
When they discovered that there was, in fact, no LMIAs for the hotels, they went to Macalipay and requested a refund of the fees that they had initially paid. He refused and instead threatened the workers with eviction from their accommodations, saying that he would call the police on them for trespassing and report them to the Canadian Border Services Agency.
They say that, to date, they have not been refunded their thousands in initial fees and are still owed their payment for two weeks of work at the hotels.
Exploitation in Keremeos farms
The remaining dozen victims of the alleged labour trafficking scheme were contracted to live and work at three separate farms in Keremeos: Lasser Produce, Lidhar Farms and Mom and Pop’s Farm Market.
At the farms, the workers say that they were only being paid for 40 hours of work per week despite actually being forced to work 80-100 hours per week. This means they are each still owed over half of the wages for the hours that they actually worked, amounting to over $2500 per month. From the wages that they were paid, Cherry and Vincent reportedly made illegal deductions for “GST” and “processing fees.”
After workers at the farms found out that the recruiters had lied to both them and their employers about the LMIA and the status of their work permits, they were forced to keep working because they had no money or means of transportation to safely leave the farms. It was after their employer at Lidhar farms said that they would have to leave that the farmworkers got in touch with Migrante BC and Damayan BC.
Organizations Answer the Call
Adam Arca, Migrante BC’s Deputy Secretary-General, told The North Star in an interview that the response to the workers’ call for support has stretched the current capacity of the organization. After a virtual meeting with the farmworkers, volunteers drove to Keremeos and back, to find them temporary housing while assessing the scope of the situation.
A similar campaign has been carried by the organization since 2024, getting justice for the victims of The Promise Land Consultancy (TPLC). Adam illustrates it as another example of “these scam immigration consultancies attracting Filipinos over with a promise of work permits.” He says those labourers end up working under the table, because the promised work permits just don’t exist.
In the hours following the press conference, Migrante organizers got a call that there were potentially 12 or more additional victims who had come forward since seeing the initial 17 went public with their stories. He mentioned that one worker in Kelowna had seen the livestream and immediately went to a resource center to get in touch with the organizations. Others, he said, were messaging the organization from Newfoundland and Taiwan with similar stories about being scammed by Ricafort and Macalipay.
“I did expect that it was going to be very big, because it seemed that Cherry and Vincent had such big connections to a lot of employers — especially in the interior of BC — but I didn’t expect the message to spread as fast as it did,” Adam expressed.
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