It sounds like the plot of a movie: the middle-aged owner of a small laundry is conned by scammers who call her and pretend to work for the district prosecutor’s office. She takes out a loan to pay them, and only realizes she was tricked when she visits the bank which supposedly handled the transfer and is told by the security guard that the bank employee she asks to see is just a made-up name. She feels sick to her stomach but then vows to track down the scammers. Her own investigation discovers that the scam boss will return from overseas for Chinese New Year, so she shares his identity and location with the police, who then arrest him and five accomplices. At least 72 other people were found to have fallen victim to the same voice phishing gang. This is the remarkable true story of Kim Sung-ja, who took down a Chinese scam gang that targeted South Koreans in 2016.
The story is so good that it did become the inspiration for a feature film. Citizen of a Kind was the highest-grossing movie in South Korea during the week of its release, and the 17th-highest grossing film of 2024. But the story is still not over. Kim appeared last week on You Quiz on the Block (pictured left), a popular interview and entertainment show on South Korea’s tvN television network. Instead of describing a happy ending, Kim revealed she has received no compensation for her losses or reward for her efforts. Per TVReport, presenter Yoo Jae-suk (pictured right) asked if Kim had received a reported KRW100mn (USD69,000) reward offered for identifying the scammers, to which Kim responded:
I didn’t receive it. How can I receive it when the police took the credit?
A policeman offered Kim a payment of KRW1mn (USD690) instead. Kim said she refused the payment because her pride was hurt.
I got calls from other police officers. They said thank you and sorry. The officer in question has not contacted me yet.
The value of the payment scammed from Kim was KRW32mn (USD22,000). She insisted that the stolen money has never been repaid to her.
At that time, there was a law that could not return the money to the victims… So far, I haven’t received a penny from the police station.
Everybody loves an underdog hero who stands up to crime. I know the sympathies of every reader of this article will be with the victims of scammers. But it is not enough to feel good about ourselves just because we watched a movie with a happy ending or read a story about fraudsters being caught and punished. Justice systems keep letting victims down, not only in South Korea but in many other countries too. We sometimes lose sight of the emotional distress and financial hardship caused by crimes like these. Scammers may convince themselves that nobody is really hurt just because they never had to face their victims in person; our police and legal systems need to be better than that.
Some countries are taking the approach that banks, telcos and other companies that fail to implement adequate anti-scam controls should be required to compensate the victims of scams. I am undecided about the merits of this approach. If the obligations are clear then it can be fair to use such a regime to incentivize businesses to do more to stop scams. However, such compensation schemes should not become an excuse for the police and prosecutors to abrogate their responsibility to catch and punish criminals. We also need to be conscious that criminals will exploit compensation schemes by submitting bogus claims unless the rules are designed to prevent this. In countries like the USA, where businesses can be harassed for not complying with know-your-customer requirements that only exist in the imaginations of politicians then there is a significant risk of arbitrary justice being applied to communications providers to distract from the almost complete failure to punish fraudsters.
Whatever opinions you may have on the correct way to balance the obligations of the public and private sector, let us aim for a more honest and transparent appraisal of the current deficiencies with how we treat the victims of scams. Scam syndicates have enormous resources at their disposal. Their technology improves every year. We cannot continue to place the onus on ordinary members of the public to defend themselves from crime. If the state is incapable of catching and punishing criminals then have-a-go heroes like Kim Sung-ja or YouTube scambaiters will not turn the tide of this crimewave, no matter how much we admire their public-spirited actions. The burden is on both the public and private sectors to do better, before ordinary people lose all confidence in the systems and services that are vital to a well-functioning society.
