Jeju Criminal Attorney Assistance Case | With the Jeju Criminal Attorney's Assistance, a Client Who Was a Romance Scam Victim Obtains Non-Referral

The Jeju criminal attorney listened in detail to how the client went from being a victim to being a suspect.

The client received a message from a woman through social media. The content of the message was a request asking whether the client could help exchange cash that she had charged on a Korean website, as she had come to Korea after studying abroad.

After the woman's persistent persuasion, the client decided to grant her request.

After signing up on the website she provided, the client contacted the customer center to exchange points worth about 27 million won in cash, but the customer center demanded ‘enhanced verification, secondary authentication,’ and the like, and continued to say that additional payments were required.

When the client no longer had any money left to deposit, the customer center gave the client a contact number, telling the client to contact the ‘website representative.’

The representative who was reached told the client about methods such as an emergency loan, and asked the client to provide the client's account number and password, taking additional money.

In that way, the client was defrauded of a total of 9.5 million won, and the client's parents, who learned of this, reported the matter to the police as a victim.

However, the client was suspected on the ground that the client had provided the client's account number to a voice phishing criminal organization, and was instead booked as a suspect and placed at risk of being referred to the prosecution.

Voice phishing is specified under the statutes as ‘telecommunications-based financial fraud.’

This is ① one of the crimes of fraud that takes another's property through an act of deception, ② committed through non-face-to-face transactions using telecommunications means, and ③ a kind of special fraud crime occurring in the financial sector.

Because the methods of voice phishing crimes are changing in various ways, different charges are applied depending on the case, but, as a basic matter, the charge of ‘crime of fraud’ is applied first.

The crime of fraud is subject to Article 347 of the Criminal Act, and may be punished by imprisonment for up to 10 years or a fine of up to 20 million won.

The roles of participation in voice phishing can be broadly divided into the account-lending role, the withdrawal role, and the collection role.

These persons are regarded as having contributed to facilitating the voice phishing fraud, and so aiding and abetting fraud is applied,

where one has handed over one's account number, as the client did, in accordance with the prohibition on the transfer or acquisition of access media (passbooks, cash cards, and the like), one is also punished under the provisions on violation of the Electronic Financial Transactions Act.

A person who violates this is subject to imprisonment for up to 3 years or a fine of up to 20 million won.

In order to prove the fact that the client was not a criminal but a victim, the attorney submitted, as reference material, news articles containing content similar to the method the client had been subjected to.

By emphasizing that, as a type of ‘romance scam’ in which money is extracted after building rapport through social media, the point-conversion fraud method had become common, the attorney emphasized that the client was also a victim of this fraud method.

1. The reason the client provided the account number and password to the person purporting to be the website representative was for the purpose of recovering the money that the client had paid after being deceived by that website's customer center.

▶ The client did not judge that the client's own account would be used in telecommunications-based financial fraud.

▶ Therefore, the charges under the Electronic Financial Transactions Act and aiding and abetting fraud cannot be applied.

2. The client was deceived and threatened a total of four times by the voice phishing group, and was ultimately defrauded of 9.5 million won. The client was merely a victim, not a suspect.