A 'Romace Scam' organization that impersonated a fictitious wealthy and extorted hundreds of millions of won on social networking services (SNS) was sentenced to three years in prison.
Romance scam is a new criminal technique that hacks other people's social media accounts abroad or creates false social media accounts, then uses the accounts to build friendships with victims and develops close relationships with friends and lovers to extort money.
Judge Lee Jang-wook of the Jeju District Court announced today (3rd) that he had sentenced A (49), who was handed over to trial for fraud, to three years in prison.
According to the charges, Mr. A recruited an account to be used for the crime in the romance scam organization and took on the role of a delivery agent to remit the money deposited in the account to the withdrawal book.
On January 24 of last year, the organization to which Mr. A belonged used KakaoTalk to introduce himself to the victim B as a civil engineer living in Manchester, England, and the next month he said, "I put 10 billion won worth of money in a suitcase. From November 2019 to April 2020, 31 times from November 2019 to April 2020, including cheating and extorting 24 million won from Mr. I took it.
Chief Judge Lee explained the reason for the sentencing, saying, "The quality of the crime and the profits obtained from the crime were taken into consideration in light of the details of the crime, the method, and the amount of damage."
(Photo = Jeju District Court website capture, Yonhap News)