Many people appear skeptical about the death of Cho Hee-pal, 55, who allegedly defrauded a large number of investors through a pyramid marketing scheme and fled to China.
A spokesman for the Intellectual Crime Investigation Squad said Monday that Cho amassed 3.5 trillion won from about 30,000 investors through the controversial scheme. He was reported to have earned net profits of 30-40 billion won.
“We are having trouble because of Cho’s alleged death. We are concentrating our efforts to find money presumed to have been hidden by Cho and his family,” the spokesman said.
Cho reportedly collapsed, while singing a song after drinking two shots of liquor during a dinner he had with five people at a restaurant in Qingdao, China’s eastern Shandong Province, on Dec. 18 last year. At that time, he complained that he had pain in his chest and stomach, sources in Seoul said.
Cho died, while being taken to a nearby hospital by an ambulance. Chinese doctors said he died of acute myocardial infarction.
The sources, however, said in Korea, he had received no medical treatment for a heart problem.
Moreover, there is no clear evidence which verifies that the man who died in Qingdao was Cho. “No samples from Cho were found at the Qingdao hospital which handled his remains. The police cannot conduct a genetic analysis of the remains as they have already been cremated,” a source said.
Cho may have bribed Chinese doctors and police officers to get a false death certificate, and his family may have held a fake funeral service, he said.
Cho changed his identity to that of “Cho Yong-bak,” a 53-year-old Korean-Chinese, and had the ethnic Korean’s ID card, driver’s license and passport issued by Chinese authorities, the source said.
People are also skeptical about the 51-second video footage of Cho’s funeral service, which was submitted to the police as evidence for his death. “A daughter of Cho preserved the video footage taken by someone. It was discovered during police raid on his house May 10. The person who took it has yet to be identified,” a source said.
“Koreans usually take video footage of wedding ceremonies. But it is rare for us to take video footage of funerals. Given this, someone took the video footage with the aim of using it as evidence for Cho’s death,” he said.
Victims of the fraud involving Cho said rumors regarding Cho’s death have spread since late last year.
They did not rule out the possibility of someone circulating such rumors intentionally.