▲ KakaoTalk conversation with account holder A
Park, a 26-year-old office worker, contacted a seller identified as A last June after seeing a post on social media advertising a so-called 4-person party for sharing OTT (video streaming service) accounts.
This method, often referred to as a 4-person party or splitting, involves up to four people sharing a single account to save on OTT subscription fees.
The account holder collects a set fee from other users and provides them with three profiles within the account.
Park paid 30,000 won, trusting A's promise to share a Wavve OTT account for one year.
However, starting in March of this year, Park's access to the profile was blocked.
When Park complained, A claimed there was an issue with the existing account and offered to provide a new one-year ID if Park paid an additional 23,000 won, after deducting the cost for the remaining three months.
Although Park sent the additional money, the new profile also stopped working after two months.
When Park tried to make contact again, A had already blocked all KakaoTalk messages and phone calls and gone into hiding.
Park was not the only victim of A's fraud.
As of June 30, the number of members in an online community cafe for victims on Naver had reached 450.
According to Lee, a 27-year-old who created the cafe, the accounts sold by A included many popular OTT services such as Netflix, Laftel, Watcha, Wavve, Apple Music, Tving, iQIYI, and Disney+.
The victims ranged from their late teens to early 30s, and the damages ranged from several thousand to tens of thousands of won.
According to The Cheat, a service that shares information on financial fraud, A used a total of nine different bank accounts.
The total damages related to these accounts amounted to approximately 5.9 million won.
Lee also suffered a loss of about 15,000 won when A went into hiding in May, with four months left on the subscription.
Victims identified A's method as a classic Ponzi scheme.
It was revealed that A operated by using money from new subscribers to extend accounts for existing ones, and then disappeared once the cash flow reached its limit.
In fact, on June 23, A sent a message to some victims stating that they could no longer manage the account operations on their own before cutting off all contact.
"At first, I thought about letting it go because the amount of damage was small, but I posted about it on social media thinking there might be other victims," Lee explained. "As more victims began leaving comments, I created the cafe to coordinate a systematic response."
Currently, victims are filing complaints against A for fraud through the cybercrime reporting system or at local police stations.
Experts analyzed this case as a typical fraud crime that exploits the fact that victims are likely to give up on reporting or taking action because the amounts are small.
In particular, the scale of the damage grew because A targeted X (formerly Twitter), where group-buying culture is active.
Lee Yoon-ho, a professor emeritus of police administration at Dongguk University, explained, "Online account sharing fraud involves small amounts of damage per person, but for the perpetrator, it can generate large profits through numerous victims. There is an aspect where such crimes are repeated because they believe the burden of punishment is low even if caught."
Furthermore, experts warned that peer-to-peer OTT account trading can lead not only to the risk of fraud but also to disadvantages due to violations of platform terms of service.
Kim Hyun-soo, a lawyer at the law firm Daeryun, said, "Most OTT companies strictly limit the scope of account sharing to family members or members of the same household through their terms of service. If you use an account that has been commercially resold beyond these limits, you may face issues such as account suspension or claims for damages, even if you are a victim of fraud."
Meanwhile, multiple attempts were made to contact A to hear their side regarding the fraud allegations, but A did not answer the phone and remained silent to text messages asking about the Ponzi scheme and intentional disappearance.
(Photo: Provided by reader, Yonhap News)
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