South Korea police seek warrants for 58 repatriated scam centre suspects

Numerous suspects who have been deported from Cambodia are wanted by South Korean police because of their alleged links to ‘pig butchering’ scams, according to the country’s police.

The National Police Agency in Seoul announced on Monday that it was looking into arrest warrants for 58 of the 64 South Korean nationals who had been detained there over the weekend over their alleged links to the scams.

According to officials, five of the repatriated people have already been detained, and five others have already been released.

The repatriations, which saw the returned South Korean nationals board their flight in handcuffs, were carried out as a result of Seoul’s efforts to address the issue of its citizens becoming victims of the scams.

Around 1, 000 of South Koreans are believed to be employed in Cambodian scam centers, where they are frequently conned into accepting jobs through fake job offers before being defrauded online by the government.

Pig butchering

The trafficked workers are held against their will at the workplaces and forced to commit online robbery against victims all over the world, luring their victims to fabricated romantic relationships before convincing them to put large sums of money into phony cryptocurrency platforms.

The act of “pig butchering” is used as a slang term for fattening up a victim before they are slaughtered.

The repatriated organization has been linked to crimes, including voice phishing, romance scams, and other fraud schemes, according to Park Sung-joo, head of South Korea’s National Office of Investigation, who last week told reporters.

According to Wi Sung-lac, the national security adviser, the detained people were both “voluntary and involuntary participants” in the scams.

public outcry

Last week, South Korea sent a delegation to Cambodia that included police, intelligence agents, and the deputy foreign minister to discuss the scam center issue, which it claims has caused dozens of South Koreans to be kidnapped.

The move comes in response to the public’s outcry over the death of a South Korean college student in Cambodia who was allegedly kidnapped and tortured by a scam center crime ring and found dead in a pick-up truck in August.

In response to concerns about its citizens being kidnapped and forced to work for the scam centers, Seoul also announced a travel ban last week.

The measures come in response to recent moves by other governments to combat the scams, which have exploded into a multibillion-dollar illicit industry since the COVID-19 pandemic, when many Chinese-owned casinos and hotels in the nation shifted to illicit operations as a result of the global shutdown.

A Cambodia-based multinational crime network, known as the Prince Group, was put on full sanctions last week by the United States and the United Kingdom for operating a number of “scam centers” throughout the area. The move, according to US Attorney General Pam Bondi, was “one of the most significant strikes ever against the global scourge of human trafficking and cyber-enabled financial fraud.”