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South Korean police have arrested a pair of scammers who stole approximately 5.5 billion won, worth $4.1 million, from an elderly citizen by promising profitable crypto investments. The Haeundae Police Station in Busan, South Korea, detained two individuals in their twenties for defrauding an elderly citizen over multiple transactions totaling 5.5 billion South Korean won.
Notable Incident in South Korea
According to a local report, the victim was promised high returns on cryptocurrency investments between September and December 2022. The fraudsters guaranteed a 70% profit on a monthly investment of 1 billion won. Police reports highlighted the scammers’ claim:
“This is a boom period for cryptocurrency. If you invest 1 billion won, you will earn 1.7 billion won in a month.”
The victim sent a total of 5.5 billion won to the scammers in six different transactions and was then provided with fake balance certificates as proof of the investments. During the fraud, the victim was shown fake balance sheets of cryptocurrency investments and real estate contracts.
South Korean police stated that the fake balance sheet showed 20 billion won worth of cryptocurrency, but none of the victim’s 5.5 billion won funds ever reached a crypto trading account. Although the police managed to arrest the scammers in time, details regarding the recovery of the funds have not yet been disclosed to the public.
South Korea and the Crypto Sector
In light of this development, it was reported that South Korea’s most infamous crypto entrepreneur, Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon, was released from prison in Montenegro on March 23rd following extradition requests from the US and South Korea. Kwon is currently facing legal charges due to the collapse of the Terra ecosystem in 2022. The prison director Darko Vukcevic commented on the matter:
“We released Do Kwon from prison because his normal sentence for traveling with fake documents ended. As he is a foreign national and his documents are being withheld, he was taken to the foreign police department for an interview, and they will take care of him from now on.”
It was reported that the decision to release Kwon came from the Supreme Court Council, which will review a decision that could either approve or deny his extradition to his home country, South Korea.
