Park Sung-joo, the new national chief of police investigations in South Korea (pictured) has announced that the working hours for the nation’s integrated telecommunications and financial fraud response center will be extended to 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. The center currently only operates on weekdays.
The change in policy comes during a major shake-up of the country’s justice system and the priorities set for crime reduction. Park was only inaugurated in his new role on June 30, and his inauguration speech addressed the need to separate the roles of investigators and prosecutors, and stated that reforms of the justice system should be based on the ‘national perspective’ as opposed to the perspective of people who currently work in law enforcement. During his first regular weekly briefing on July 7, Park said police officers should become ‘strong against crime’ and referred to the need for ‘special measures’ to tackle voice phishing and illegal drugs. He also asserted that voice phishing would be his ‘top priority’ alongside the investigation of drug crimes.
Other key reforms outlined by Park include:
- a reorganization to improve work on cross-border crimes;
- better training for police who specialize in particular kinds of crimes; and
- zero tolerance for crimes that undermine people’s livelihoods.
The reforms received the support of Yoo Jae-sung, the deputy and acting head of the National Police Agency, during a speech on July 21. Maeil Business Newspaper reported Yoo as saying:
보이스피싱 등 최근 사기 범죄는 발달된 금융·통신을 이용해 불특정 다수로부터 재산상 이익을 편취하는 형태로, 날로 증가하고 있다. 피해액도 상당하다
Voice phishing and other recent fraud crimes are increasing day by day, using advanced financial and communication technologies to obtain financial benefits from unspecified numbers of people. The amount of damage is also significant.
Official South Korean police figures state that the losses due to voice phishing were KRW642bn (USD470mn) during the first half of 2025. If the rate of loss continues then the official annual figure will exceed KRW1tn (USD730mn) for the first time in history.
It is good to see a national police force placing so much emphasis on reducing a highly damaging but non-violent crime that has been so foolishly ignored by the justice systems of other countries. The South Korean authorities evidently appreciate how the communications and banking sectors are both entangled in a web where neither can effectively reduce crime without the cooperation of the other. They also appreciate that the private sector will fail to reduce consumer fraud without the dedication of significant police resources, especially when crimes are committed across borders. However, these reforms come after the panic created by the privacy breach affecting 25 million users of SK Telecom’s network. It can be argued that there were already plenty of warning signs prior to the breach, with the police having to resort to offering rewards to scammers who supply information about overseas scam compounds and a film based on the true story of a member of the public tracking down a scamlord being one of the most popular releases of 2024.
The private sector is now throwing a lot of money at restoring the confidence of Koreans in electronic communications. SK Telecom will spend KRW500bn (USD370mn) this year on giveaways to placate existing customers, and has committed to spending KRW700bn (USD510mn) on a five-year plan to enhance security. KT, their leading rivals, have said they will spend even more. They announced a budget of KRW1tn (USD730mn) to be spent on improving customer security over the next five years, though they stated this had been decided prior to the breach at SK Telecom, and was a response to a string of privacy breaches that occurred in 2023 at US operators including AT&T, T‑Mobile and Verizon.
South Korea is a developed economy with some of the highest penetration rates for advanced network communications in the world. What is most striking about the news emanating from South Korea is not that the public and private sectors are now committing so many resources to defending ordinary Koreans from networked crimes. The real shock is the comparison with the lackadaisical attitudes still prevalent in other developed economies.
There are blowhards in other rich countries who behave as if they have something to teach the rest of the world about fraud reduction, seemingly because they are ignorant of how rapidly they are falling behind. The anti-fraud work being undertaken by the public and private sectors in leading countries like South Korea, Singapore, Australia and Ireland needs to be treated like case studies for others to emulate. Sadly, there are some countries that cannot hear the news because they are so engrossed in talking about themselves.
The humility of public officials and corporate executives who admit how much they need to change is a sign that South Korean decision-makers are conscious of the widening chasm between security expectations and current delivery. Those countries where ineffectual leaders prefer to procrastinate and to minimize the extent of the challenge they face will inevitably make their populations suffer more, for longer, and will then be faced with an even larger bill to bring crime under control.
