Police Take Action: Financial Losses from New Types of Scams Decline Following Drop in Phishing Cases

Tailored Countermeasures Implemented After Analyzing Criminal Methods
Losses in May Drop 32.5% Compared to April

As the police have focused their efforts on tackling fraud crimes, cases of voice phishing have seen a marked decline, and now losses from new types of scam crimes, such as romance scams, have also dropped significantly.

The National Police Agency announced on the 17th that, as a result of implementing customized countermeasures against new scams — such as blocking social networking services (SNS) and fraudulent applications, and establishing a prevention system for proxy purchase scams (no-show scams) — the number of victims is clearly decreasing in areas including investment group chatroom scams, team mission side-job scams, no-show scams, and romance scams.

National Police Agency, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul. Photo by Hyunmin Kim

After the launch of the Integrated Response Team for Telecommunications Financial Fraud, voice phishing crimes have sharply declined, but new types of scams had only been suppressed at the level of preventing further increases. The police analyzed these criminal methods and implemented tailored countermeasures.

As a result, comparing the fourth quarter of last year to the first quarter of this year, the financial losses from new scam crimes decreased by 11.7%, from 332.6 billion won to 293.8 billion won. More recently, losses dropped further from 101.8 billion won in April to 68.7 billion won last month, marking a 32.5% decrease. The number of cases also fell by 15.5% during this period, from 1,741 to 1,472. The trend is even clearer when looking at last year’s figures: in the fourth quarter of last year, losses reached 332.6 billion won, more than double the 143.8 billion won from the same period the year before. However, in the first quarter of this year, losses increased by only 42.8% year-on-year to 293.8 billion won, indicating the rate of increase has slowed.

Last month, financial losses from investment group chatroom scams amounted to 41.3 billion won, a 26.1% decrease compared to the first quarter’s monthly average of 55.9 billion won. Losses from romance scams dropped from 7.5 billion won to 7.2 billion won, and team mission scams declined from 14.0 billion won to 5.7 billion won.

New types of scams tend to use communication tools such as phone calls or text messages only to make initial contact with victims; afterwards, they continue their conversations through SNS and other platforms. This means that measures such as blocking phone numbers alone are insufficient. The Integrated Response Team has significantly expanded the blocking of criminal accounts by working in collaboration with major platforms such as Naver and Kakao, and has shared the latest criminal techniques to help these platforms incorporate them into their own detection and prevention systems.

To apprehend criminal organizations based overseas, cooperation with foreign investigative agencies is also being strengthened. With the support of a government-wide special task force on transnational crime, involving ten agencies including the National Police Agency and the National Intelligence Service, a total of 281 fugitives involved in new scam crimes have been extradited to Korea from November last year to recently.

The National Police Agency also plans to accelerate efforts to establish an institutional foundation to address blind spots in the fight against new scam crimes. Currently, some new scam crimes are excluded from account suspension under the Act on the Refund of Financial Losses from Telecommunications Fraud. The police are working together with the Financial Services Commission to improve the system and expand the scope of account suspensions.

Park Sungjoo, Head of the National Investigation Headquarters, stated, "As we have reduced the damage from new scams through countermeasures tailored to the characteristics of these crimes, we will continue to stay one step ahead of evolving methods to protect the valuable assets of our citizens."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.