South-Korea to impose life imprisonment for crypto scammers
Last Updated on 8 February 2024 by CryptoTips.eu
During the crypto disaster year that was 2022, there were two places in the world where the failures of digital companies caused painful losses: in the United States, where many FTX customers (and holders of the FTT coin) could no longer access their accounts. And in South Korea, where investors who had rode the wave of Luna and Terra saw their wealth disappear from one day to the next.
Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon left a hole of more than $45 billion in 2022 when his company went bankrupt. Most of that investment came from people living in Seoul of course.
The South Korean government therefore adopted new regulations this week that make it possible to impose life sentences on crypto criminals. The new rules will come into effect as from the autumn.
Haru Invest
This happens for two reasons. Firstly, because more and more young South Koreans are investing a fair amount of their savings in crypto (also because the housing market has become virtually affordable for them) and secondly, because more and more crypto scandals are surfacing in Seoul.
Just this week, three former managers of crypto platform Haru Invest were charged with fraud. They had promised investors interest rates on their cryptocurrency investments that turned out to be too good to be true. When the platform went bankrupt in July last year, it left a hole of some $823 million.
NEW: 🇰🇷 Seoul Southern District Prosecutor's Office announces that three executives of #cryptocurrency platform Haru Invest were arrested for allegedly defalcating 1.1T Korean won (💵 $826M) pic.twitter.com/OCFizOclvm
— Bitcoin News (@BitcoinNewsCom) February 6, 2024
South Koreans have been crazy about Bitcoin for some time now. In 2017-2018, when Bitcoin first rose to $20k, about a third of the South Korean youth had invested in crypto. At the time, Bithumb, South Korea’s largest crypto exchange, held more than $6 billion in user funds.