A woman in her 50s who lived under someone else's identity for 15 years using an ID she picked up on the street and carried out a fraud scheme worth about 1.5 billion won has been caught by police.
Jeju Eastern Police Station said on the 14th that it detained and forwarded a suspect, identified as A, on charges including fraud under the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Economic Crimes, falsifying electronic records, forging private documents, and theft.
Police said A picked up the ID on the street in 2011 and used it to conceal identity, then from December 2018 to February this year took money from acquaintances under the pretense of investment.
A flaunted personal wealth to acquaintances and deceived them by saying that if they entrusted money to an acquaintance who was a shareholder in a lend business, they would receive higher interest than at commercial banks. Fooled by A's lies, five victims transferred a total of 1,570,820,000 won over multiple occasions.
A paid interest to the victims as if investments had been made, but there were no actual investments. When the embezzled money ran out, A is believed to have prepared to flee starting in December last year. The police investigation began in March when victims, whose interest payments had stopped, filed complaints.
While investigating the case, police found that suspects with different names shared the common trait of being self-employed. Merging the cases, police uncovered that A had stolen another person's identity.
After the police investigation began, A fled to multiple regions by stealing the victims' names, and police arrested A at a goshiwon in Gwangju.