People who bought and sold drugs on a large scale using social media (SNS) such as Telegram and virtual assets were arrested in droves by police.
The Gangwon Provincial Police Agency's mobile investigation unit said on the 22nd that over the past year it apprehended a total of 131 people, including 54 distributors and sellers and 77 users, on charges including violating the Narcotics Control Act and psychotropic offenses under the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Crimes, and detained 44 of them.
It was found that the suspects conducted transaction of narcotics through closed distribution networks built on secure messengers such as Telegram. Distributors used meticulous methods such as smuggling drugs via international mail, then subdividing and repackaging them domestically for distribution.
Most of the narcotics were identified as having been brought in from Southeast Asia.
To evade investigation, they exchanged drug payments using virtual assets, and more than 60% of the suspects were in their 20s and 30s familiar with virtual asset transaction.
The investigation found that the suspects divided roles and distributed drugs in an organized manner, but they operated in a cell-like structure, limiting the ability to clearly identify the organization's entity. Accordingly, charges of joining or participating in a criminal organization were not applied.
In the process of apprehending them, police seized narcotics including 1.7 kilograms of methamphetamine worth about 700 million won at market prices. That is enough for about 60,000 people to inject at the same time.
A Gangwon police official said, "Online drug crimes are serious social crimes that spread without constraints of time and space," adding, "We will continue strong crackdowns by deploying specialized investigators against online and virtual asset-based drug crimes so that the awareness is established that no matter where they are, they will surely be apprehended and strictly punished."