Warning

As usual, when two people fall in love, they decide to come together and marry. Nothing wrong with that. But sometimes there is a slight problem, because the beautiful bride is already married, or there are other difficulties to obtain the required "Single Certificate".  There is no divorce in the Philippines, so the only legal possibility is the "Annulment of Marriage". This is a lengthy process, and costs a lot of money (typically more than 100.000 Pesos).  So she looks for other possibilities:

Obtain a new identity. This is a fairly common procedure in the Philippines, as people very often have not been registered properly. So they try a "Late Registration".  On the other hand, the officials know that this is misused quite a lot of times and they check very carefully. There are a lot of papers requested to prove that she is the person she claims to be (including school records, certificate of baptism etc. ) 

The other possibility is to fake the single certificate. There are people available in Manila who claim to be able to do this. But all the official papers of the NSO are printed on special security paper which is quite difficult to fake.  And once it is discovered that such faked copies are used to obtain a visa or similar papers, the Filipina is in real trouble. 

Here are two examples of people who had offered such help:

First of all, both of course will be able to do a legal marriage, but they are far too expensive. Second,  of course they offer to process all the papers (Birth, and Single certificates) for the girl, but again for far too much money. there are cheaper ways available. And in the special case of the single certificate, Norman had produced a faked document with a very bad quality. Fortunately our friends discovered that early enough, and they actually could get the real and legal certificate anyway. 

Popo on the other hand had offered to remove the corresponding marriage entry entry from the marriage registry either for a certain time or permanently, for a hefty price. He was talking about more than 100000 Pesos. We can only warn against these practices.

Just to explain the difficulties of our friends: She was married, but her husband had died. So what she needed was a certificate of death of her former husband to be able to obtain the single certificate. And this proved to be quite difficult, but they managed to do it all the legal way.