These African scammers sure are creative and their victims seem to get dumber and dumber:
African con artists have found another way to swindle Koreans, this time by selling pieces of regular paper that they claim are actually U.S. banknotes.
In this so-called “black money” or “money wash” scam, unsuspecting victims are persuaded that stacks of banknote-sized black pieces of paper are $100 bills that have been dyed black and smuggled from a U.S. relief fund for Africa. Wide-eyed victims then pay large amounts of money for heaps of black paper and a dye-remover machine or liquid, believing they have purchased U.S. dollars far below the exchange rate.
Last month, a 45-year-old Korean businessman was strolling through Itaewon, a popular neighborhood in Seoul known for its many cafes, bars and foreign restaurants, when a Liberian approached him and said he had a lucrative business proposal. After leading the Korean to a nearby parked van, he fed a piece of black paper into a small machine, and soon the device spit out a crisp $100 bill. The businessman took the bill to a bank, where he was told that it was genuine.
He paid 540 million won ($463,100) for the machine and a sizable portion of black paper. He borrowed the money from associates.
The machine was a simple paper dispenser previously loaded for the demonstration with a genuine banknote. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read the rest at the link, but it seems the victim is just as bad as the con artist if they though they were receiving stolen African aid money.
The suspect in the murder on Mount Sapae in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi, changed his story and admitted he initially tried to rape the victim.
Uijeongbu police announced on Tuesday that they found problems with the suspected culprit’s denial of rape in the initial questioning.
“While conducting analysis at the crime scene and reconstructing the crime, we found some contradictions with the culprit’s testimony,” an official in charge said. “We then used a lie detector to find out that he actually had attempted to rape the victim before killing and robbing her.”
The suspected culprit, surnamed Jeong, confessed to having initially denied raping the victim in order to avoid heavier punishment. The 45-year-old turned himself in on Friday after strangling a 55-year-old woman to death and robbing her of cash on Mount Sapae on June 7. The body of the woman was found on Thursday morning by hikers.
According to police, Jeong brought a bottle of soju to the mountain in misery after finding out he only had 14,000 won ($11.87) left in his pocket. While roaming the mountain drunk, he allegedly spotted the victim sitting on a bench by herself and approached her from behind with the intention of raping her. Police say that after strangling her with his left arm and punching her in the head twice, he undressed her from the waist up and pulled down her pants, but when he realized the victim was dead he ran away with her wallet, which contained 15,000 won and a credit card. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
Despite being convicted of embezzling nearly a million dollars, the CEO of the largest foreign language business in South Korea, Pagoda has received no jail time with her entire sentence being suspended:
Park Kyung-sil
PAGODA Academy CEO Park Kyung-sil was found guilty of embezzlement and breach of trust, an appellate court said Tuesday.
The Seoul High Court sentenced the 61-year-old leader of Korea’s major foreign language institute to two-years-and-six months in prison with the term suspended for three years.
The ruling was made after the court reviewed the case at the request of the Supreme Court, which found faults with the grounds for the appellate court’s ruling.
Park was indicted in 2013 on charges of pocketing one billion won ($849,000) in corporate money and inflicting losses of 53 billion won on the company by mismanagement. She pled guilty to the embezzlement charge. [Korea Times]
I hope they give this guy some serous jail time because if not this will just encourage other nut jobs to do the same thing. I think this should be considered attempted murder because someone could have been killed by this bomb:
This file photo shows a South Korean man, identified only by his surname Chon, who has been indicted over the suspected bombing last year of a public restroom at a Tokyo war shrine. In his first court hearing at the Tokyo District Court on June 14, 2016, Chon admitted to his involvement in the bombing, news reports said. (Yonhap)
A South Korean man admitted Tuesday to his involvement in the suspected bombing last year of a public restroom at a Tokyo war shrine in his first court hearing at the Tokyo District Court, news reports said.
The 28-year-old suspect, identified only by his surname Chon, has been indicted on charges of breaking into the premises of Yasukuni Shrine on Nov. 23 and bombing the public restroom.
Chon was arrested in December shortly after voluntarily returning to Tokyo by plane.
In Tuesday’s hearing, prosecutors said Chon attempted to install an explosive device with a digital timer at the main hall of the shrine out of his discontent over the war-linked shrine that honors Japanese wartime leaders who were convicted as war criminals.
But he put it in the restroom instead after failing to do so due to tight security, they said.
Chon’s defense counsel reportedly asked the court to give him a reduced penalty as the incident is not a grave one as no one was injured and he has no chance of repeating the offense as he will find it difficult to enter Japan again down the road. [Yonhap]
You can read the rest at the link, but the other nut jobs the anti-Korean activist group, Zaitokukai showed up to the hearing to protest against Chon and had a lot of bad things to say about Koreans in general.
The arrest of the three men accused of gang raping a Korean teacher on the remote Korean island Heuksan-do has finally happened. Due to the public outrage it appears the Korean police are not going to give the perpetrators the benefit of using the “I was drunk excuse” so commonly used in these cases:
Three suspects have been charged with premeditated rape and assault in the investigation of a sexual assault case involving a female teacher in her 20s by three local men from Heuksan Island in Sinan County, South Jeolla.
The three suspects were scheduled to be sent to the prosecution today for further investigation. Each is a father of children in kindergarten, elementary or middle school. The children of two of the suspects are attending the school where the victim worked. They were arrested by police last Saturday, after the victim reported the crime.
One of the suspects, surnamed Park, 49, owns the restaurant where the teacher was having dinner prior to the crime on May 21. He and one other suspect, Lee, 34, are accused of having invited the teacher to join them and getting her drunk.
After the victim became intoxicated, Park brought her to a building at an elementary school at 11:00 p.m in his car while Lee followed. About 30 minutes later, police say, the other suspect, Kim, 38, drove to the elementary school building, as well.
The police initially planned to impose less severe charges on the three since they claimed the rape was not planned.
“The testimonies of the three suspects didn’t match,” said a police officer. “They seemed to have lied when they said the crime was not plotted.”
But given that the three suspects live in the same neighborhood, contacted each other before and after the crime and went inside the building and raped the victim in sequence, the police charged them with premeditated rape. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more at the link. Also for those wondering where Heuksan-do island is located at here is a Google Map of its location:
Incredibly the arrest of one of the suspects surnamed Kim has been linked to a 2007 rape in Daejon. The DNA found on the teacher matched the DNA found on the victim in the Daejon case. Due to the victim speaking out about this rape she may have gotten a serial rapist off the streets. It seems like if someone wanted to lie low and hide out somewhere Heuksando would be a place to go.
I don’t think there is any more danger for women on Korean mountains than there would be in the city. That is why I don’t think these recent murders should cause people to avoid hiking in Korea:
When a 55-year-old female hiker was found dead this week on a mountain in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi, police officers didn’t want to think she was murdered.
Just 10 days before and 7 kilometers (4 miles) away on a different mountain, a 60-year-old woman was stabbed to death by a man recently released from prison. Murders are hardly common at spots where people hike, a favorite Korean pastime.
But on Thursday, police acknowledged that the 55-year-old appears to have been choked to death. Autopsy results found bruises “all over her body.”
A sexual assault is also possible.
Police are now wondering whether lone female hikers have become new targets for brutal killings.
“When a murder case unfolds on a mountain, very rarely can you find a witness,” said Lee Yoon-ho, a police administration professor at Dongguk University in Jung District, central Seoul.
The police have no suspects in the alleged murder case on Mount Sapae (1,808 feet), where the 55-year-old was choked, which is one of the most popular hiking destinations in Gyeonggi.
A lot of women say they are less keen to go hiking alone.
On a recent visit to the scene of the crime on Mount Surak (2,100 feet), where the 60-year-old was stabbed, very few people were spotted. Even male hikers admitted they were feeling slightly anxious. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read the rest at the link, but the article calls for CCTV camera to be set up along popular hiking trails to protect hikers. It seems a bit overboard to me to put up CCTV cameras all over the country to protect against crimes. If people are so concerned for their safety than carry some pepper spray for personal protection.
Some may say this is victim blaming, but I think it is just common sense to not get drunk alone with people you just met in a foreign country you know nothing about, unless of course they used a date rape drug against her which is an entirely different story. With that said lets hope these three guys are vigorously investigated by Korean authorities which have a well established track record of poorly handling sexual assault cases like this:
Three Korean males have been arrested on charges of gang-raping a Swedish tourist they met at a nightclub in Hongdae, Seoul, police said Wednesday.
The men, in their 20s, allegedly asked the woman to go out the club, saying they would “show her Korean nightlife” on May 14, according to investigators.
The tourist and the men drank until the next morning, resulting in the victim becoming very drunk. The men then allegedly took her to a house, where they raped her and photographed her naked body.
The victim complained to the Swedish Embassy, which asked police to investigate the matter.
The three were arrested on May 24 after police viewed surveillance camera recordings and photos of the suspects left on the woman’s mobile phone, according to Mapo Police Station. [Korea Times]
It looks like a New Zealand diplomat and his friends are in some serious trouble from an incident that happened recently in Itaewon:
Police questioned a New Zealand diplomat on Wednesday for allegedly obstructing officers who tried to arrest his friends on suspicion of molesting a female bar worker.
Yongsan Police Station in Seoul said two companions of the diplomat, whose identity remains unknown, allegedly molested a female employee at a bar in Itaewon Tuesday night and assaulted a security guard who tried to take them to police. As police tried to arrest the two, the diplomat allegedly pushed them and kicked the patrol car.
The diplomat and his friends were taken to the police station that night. But the diplomat was freed under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which gives foreign diplomats here immunity from civil or criminal prosecution. [Korea Times]
The recent murder of a Korean woman in Gangnam is being used to bring attention to the issue of violent crime against women. Now Vice News has jumped on the bandwagon to publish an article criticizing a culture that allows violent crimes against women in South Korea to occur:
ourners march during a rally on Saturday to pay tribute to a South Korean woman who was stabbed to death near Gangnam Station in Seoul. [AP/NEWSIS]
For years now, South Korea has been trying to build a legal system to deal with the problem. As Dr Kyungja Jung, of the University of Technology Sydney told me, the country has come far since the days when police themselves would sexually assault detained female activists.”There has been tremendous changes in legislation, services, and programs for the victims,” she said.
Neither is South Korea the only country struggling with the issue. All countries experience some baseline level of sexism and the latest numbers from the World Health Organisation suggest 35 percent of women worldwide have experienced sexual violence.
But South Korea, a country with one of the most influential youth cultures in Asia, is also a society with a deep gender inequality according to the World Economic Forum which ranks the nation 117 out of 142, putting it alongside Qatar and Nigeria.
This is a subject Koreans do not like to discuss, partly because defamation laws in the country are strong, making criticism of the government, police, or major corporations dangerous. Many of those I contacted over the last two weeks were afraid to talk for fear of a lawsuit, though few would say so outright.
When they responded, they were often “too busy.” One person who worked in a frontline support service for rape victims told someone who had contacted them on my behalf: “This is a sensitive issue and I am Korean.”
Those more willing to speak out were young activists. One male activist who worked on a team which monitored rapists on Sora.net told me that in 1995, seven out of 10 women were victims of violent crimes, but that number has increased to nine out of 10. Because I can’t speak Korean, I cannot easily verify those numbers, but I asked him why he thought that was. [Vice News]
You can read much more at the link, but in my opinion this article is poor journalism which this last excerpted paragraph is an example of. The writer admits that he can’t verify the statistic that 9 out of 10 women in South Korea were victims of violent crimes, but went ahead and published it anyway. If 90% of the women in Korea are victims of violent crime there would be a political revolution to improve public safety. The President is a woman so does anyone think she would stand for such a thing?
Poor Example
A random murder by a mentally deranged homeless person that had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals does not suddenly make South Korea a haven for violent crime against women. Speaking of this murderer the article made no mention that he was schizophrenic and instead led readers to believe he simply killed the woman because he hated women. This narrative is about as honest as the “gentle giant” narrative used by the US media after the Michael Brown shooting.
As far as some of the other examples used in the article such as the Australian woman interviewed and the man acquitted of rape because he had a curved man part I would like to hear the other side of the story because often these stories are never as simple as advocates claim them to be. With that all said the premise that South Korea has a problem investigating sexual assault cases I think is true, I just hate tabloid journalism being used to make this point.
Past Investigations
In the past South Korean authorities were just incompetent with dealing with violent crime against women. I can remember when a US soldier was raped shortly after she arrived at Incheon International Airport and the rapist was acquitted because the soldier did not resist enough. In another case the sentencing for rape was so light that whether the suspect committed robbery as was the focus of the case because it had more jail time. Then there is this case of a foreign English teacher who was brutally raped and forced to suffer police incompetence afterwards. Finally who can forget the Miryang Gang Rape case which was just a travesty.
I do have to admit that things have gotten better in recent years such as South Korea finally barring teachers convicted of sex crimes of getting their jobs back. Even the ROK military has launched a campaign to crackdown on sexual assault and harassment within their ranks which they have long been known for. What do the statistics say? Well they say arrests for rape have skyrocketed over the last decade.
It is important to keep in mind that just because arrests are up this does not necessarily mean that rape is up. It can be argued that due to awareness campaigns in South Korea women are now more likely to report rape and the police are taking the allegations more seriously.
How do these statistics stack up against the United States? With a population of 51 million people in South Korea and 20,045 rape arrests in 2014 this has a occurence rate of 1 in 2,544 people. The Department of Justice reported 284,350 rapes in the United States in 2014 and with a population of 318 million this comes out to an occurrence rate of 1 in 1,118 people. This is higher than South Korea, but keep in mind difference in statistic compilation does make comparisons difficult, but does give an indication that rapes are lower in South Korea than the US.
Conclusion
Today I think the problem is mostly how Korean police look differently at alcohol related sexual assaults than other countries. If Korea is like the US, the vast majority of rape cases are probably he said/she said cases that involve alcohol. When alcohol is involved South Korean authorities are well known for showing more leniency towards perpetrators though in recent years there has been some changes to the law. In the United States alcohol is not considered the mitigating factor for committing crime like it is in South Korea. In fact at least in the US military alcohol has been used as factor to over prosecute people for sexual assault.
This is an area I think women in Korea need to be aware of that a date rape type of scenario after a night of drinking alcohol, it is likely to be more difficult to get Korean authorities to vigorously investigate and prosecute the perpetrator. So looking at the facts South Korea does not necessarily have a violent crime problem against women, it just has a different perspective in regards to how vigorously it will prosecute these crimes when it involves alcohol. This perspective appears to be slowly changing with the increased rape arrests and I would not be surprised if arrests continue to increase in the coming years as societal attitudes towards the crime continue to change.
Statistics from the 