Police said their efforts to block increasingly sophisticated voice phishing crimes prevented 10.3 billion won in losses so far this year.
The Gyeonggi Northern Provincial Police Agency said on the 27th it achieved these results through voice phishing prevention efforts and focused investigations this year. In the process, officers arrested 718 suspects involved in the crimes and detained 56 of them in the most serious cases.
According to the Gyeonggi Northern Provincial Police Agency, the fraud schemes encountered in the field were meticulous, and many victims who were completely deceived by the perpetrators struggled to accept that it was fraud even after repeated explanations from police.
In fact, in Goyang, Gyeonggi, on the previous month, an elderly couple in their 80s, completely misled by the psychological pressure of a scam ring impersonating the Financial Supervisory Service and the Prosecution Service prosecutors, were in a precarious situation of consolidating their entire assets of 1.5 billion won into a single account to transfer the funds.
When the metropolitan prevention patrol unit of the Gyeonggi Northern Provincial Police Agency detected red flags and rushed to the couple's home, the couple, instructed by the perpetrators to maintain absolute secrecy, resisted and refused even to open the front door, insisting nothing was wrong. Fortunately, after persistent persuasion by officers, they changed their minds and had payments from the account suspended.
A more urgent chase unfolded in April. After police received a report that "my wife has left for Chuncheon, Gangwon, to withdraw money," they tracked her using the GPS location system and headed to Gapyeong Station. At the time, the victim was moments away from meeting a voice phishing cash collector to hand over the money.
After finding the vehicle the victim had taken, police urgently asked that the train's departure be delayed briefly. They scoured the station and called out the license plate number to locate the owner, eventually finding the victim. Thanks to that, they prevented a loss of 15 million won and arrested the cash collector.
As a result of these across-the-board prevention and enforcement efforts, from January to June this year, the number of voice phishing cases in the Gyeonggi Northern region fell 39.8%, from 925 in the same period last year to 557 this year. The actual losses borne by residents also more than halved, dropping 53.9% from 29.44 billion won to 13.56 billion won.