South Korea Seizes 500 Million Won in Cryptocurrency Assets: The "Money Laundering Chain" in Fake Luxury Goods Sales Case

Recently, the Korea Customs Service at the Incheon headquarters uncovered a major counterfeit luxury goods sales case. According to official reports, the case involves approximately 77,000 counterfeit items, with a market value equivalent to 120 billion Korean won (about $90 million), making it a typical cross-border e-commerce crime. More notably, the criminals used encrypted assets to conceal their profits, reflecting an upgrade in new money laundering methods.

The Money Chain of High Profits

The criminal group sold counterfeit luxury goods on a large scale through online stores, illegally earning 16.5 billion Korean won (about $12.4 million). This astronomical illegal income was not kept in traditional bank accounts but was diverted into multiple channels—some funds were exchanged for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, with about 500 million Korean won (around $380,000) stored in hardware wallets, attempting to hide their tracks through cold wallets to evade law enforcement.

Law Enforcement’s Seizure Results

Korean authorities were not fooled by this concealment scheme. They successfully seized and froze the encrypted assets in the hardware wallets, and also fully frozen assets related to the case, including apartments, hotels, and luxury cars, with a total asset control scale of 8 billion Korean won (about $6 million). The case demonstrates the improved capability of law enforcement agencies worldwide in cross-border digital asset recovery and serves as a warning to market participants: even when using encrypted assets for concealment, escaping legal sanctions remains difficult.