Losses from voice phishing have dropped sharply as police worked with financial and telecom institutions to block the tools used in such crimes before they reach victims. Losses in August fell more than 76% from a year earlier, the lowest level since 2023.
The Korean National Police Agency held an event on the 29th at KT's Gwanghwamun building in Seoul's Jongno District to mark the first anniversary of its Integrated Response Task Force on Telecommunications-Based Financial Fraud and to announce results from the past year.
The task force, launched on Sept. 29 last year, handled 281,178 reports and tips through the end of August. Voice phishing cases and losses, which peaked in July last year, came in below year-earlier levels for 11 consecutive months from October last year through August, after the task force began operating.
Losses in August totaled 25.7 billion won, down 76.4% from 109 billion won in the same month a year earlier and the lowest since 2023. Cases in the January-August period fell 49% to 8,584 from 16,765 a year earlier. Losses over the same period dropped 56% to 387.1 billion won from 885.6 billion won.
New types of scams, such as fraudulent investment chat rooms and romance scams, had risen since October last year as a spillover effect of the decline in voice phishing, but began falling in July. In August, such scams numbered 1,127 cases with losses of 58.4 billion won, both the lowest since the task force was created.
Police shifted away from tracking perpetrators after damage occurs and focused instead on blocking the means of the crime in advance. Under an emergency blocking system introduced in November last year, phone numbers used in crimes are cut off within 10 minutes of a report, and 118,927 numbers were blocked through August.
Previously, suspending a number took more than two days, but the process was sharply shortened through cooperation with the three mobile carriers and Samsung Electronics. This year, police also analyzed about 44,300 phone lines opened for criminal purposes and detected and blocked them preemptively.
Police also prevented harm to 32,753 people by detecting signs that malicious applications had been installed or that phishing sites had been accessed, sending urgent alerts or dispatching officers directly. Working with platform operators including NAVER and Kakao, they blocked about 61,000 social media accounts used in the crimes and sent about 53,000 warning messages to people believed to be at risk.
The consultation system was also strengthened. Police more than doubled the number of counselors and created shift teams to build a response system operating 24 hours a day, year-round. The response rate, which had fallen to 62.9% in July last year, averaged 97.4% from the task force's launch through August. A dedicated hotline, 1394, has been in operation since February.
Police are also widening the scope of their response to new types of scams. To address the fact that some of these scams fall outside the accounts eligible for payment suspension under the current law on refunds for telecommunications fraud victims, police have been running a system to freeze transactions in accounts suspected of involvement in new scams since June 30, working with financial authorities. They are also pursuing legislation on preventing large-scale fraud using telecommunications, aimed at comprehensively addressing new and modified forms of fraud that create many victims.
"The task force has built a one-stop comprehensive response system spanning finance, telecommunications and investigation, and has shifted from cleaning up after the fact to preemptive prevention and blocking," said Kim Jong-cheol, acting commissioner general of the Korean National Police Agency. "Through close cooperation with related agencies, please work to block evolving phishing crimes at the source."
