A group that ran an unregistered driving training business by touting lesson fees at half the market rate and pocketed several hundred million won was caught by police.
Seongbuk Police Station in Seoul said on the 13th that it apprehended four operators of an illegal driving training business and three affiliated driving instructors on suspicion of violating the Road Traffic Act and the Electronic Financial Transactions Act.
They are accused of providing illegal training to about 3,200 people nationwide from Nov. 2024 to Jan. this year and collecting about 780 million won in return.
According to police, they recruited trainees at 270,000 won for 10 hours of driving training using a personal car or 320,000 won using a training vehicle, which is about half the market rate.
They promoted themselves like a legitimate company by, among other things, creating a website, but the business registration number and the representative's name were all fake, it was found. It also turned out they had neither instructor certifications nor insurance that would cover trainees.
Police said, "There was no emergency braking device in the training vehicles," adding, "It posed a threat to road traffic safety, including to the trainees."
To evade investigative tracking, they managed the revenue under borrowed names and also used burner phones, according to police. Police seized 137 bank accounts opened under borrowed identities and eight mobile phones from an office in Daejeon.
Police plan to refer them to prosecutors soon after additional investigation.