Phoney free-porn Website swindles 50,000 out of 1 billion won
Over 50,000 Korean Internet users were swindled out of some 1 billion won ($864,000) while they tried to watch “free porn movies.”
The prosecution indicted Friday a 37-year-old with physical detention on charges of deceiving the users with a fake free-porn website and swindling a total of 1.03 billion won from the victims through a mobile payment system.
According to the Busan District Prosecutors’ Office, the indicted, surnamed Kim, has advertised on eight online communities that free porn is available at his website using only a simple adult verification pass.
Kim designed his website based on the idea that adult verification and mobile payment systems function based on similar procedures.
On his website, if a user typed in an ID and mobile phone numbers for authentication, the website automatically sent an authorization code through a text message. As the user put in the code, the website automatically charged 19,800 won to the user’s phone bill under the guise of mobile payments.
Knowing immediately they were ripped off, however, the victims hesitated to report the fraud to police because they had sought to view pornography, which is illegal in Korea, and the amount of money lost was relatively small, according to the prosecution.