[Anchor]
SBS has confirmed that commercial banks in South Korea have sold over 1.1 million housing subscription accounts to foreigners over the past five years. As housing subscription accounts are virtually useless for foreign nationals, criticism is mounting that banks pushed these products simply to meet sales quotas without providing proper explanations.
Reporter Go Jeong-hyeon has the details.
[Reporter]
Three years ago, when Person A, a Philippine national, was a high school student, she went to a bank to obtain a certificate of deposit balance for college admissions, only to unexpectedly end up opening a housing subscription account as well.
[Person A / Philippine national: "(The bank teller) just casually pushed it, saying, 'It's good to sign up for this.' ... Later, when I checked on my phone, I saw that a housing subscription account had been created."]
An automatic transfer of 20,000 won was deducted every month, but after talking with a friend, she belatedly realized it was an unnecessary product and canceled it.
[Person A / Philippine national: "It's useless now, and older foreign friends told me, 'Even if you have this, you can't use it,' so (I canceled it)."]
A civic group assisting foreign residents in Korea stated that such cases are frequent.
[Jeong Yu-rim / Labor and Human Rights Center: "There are many people who have only been here a few months and are neither fluent in Korean nor familiar with how things work in Korea, yet there are cases where they signed up for housing subscription accounts without even knowing what housing subscription is..."]
From 2022 to the first half of this year, the top five commercial banks sold more than 1.15 million housing subscription products to foreigners.
However, during the same period, only 90 cases—a mere 0.007%—actually won a housing allotment.
The allotment rate is extremely low because housing subscription accounts are practically useless for foreign nationals.
Under the Resident Registration Act, foreigners are not recognized as household members, disqualifying them from applying for special allotments for both public and private housing. In general allotments for private housing, they are also prohibited from applying under the "first-priority status in regulated areas."
Although they can apply under "second-priority or lower status in regulated areas" or in "non-regulated areas," the criteria for earning points are also very difficult for foreigners to meet.
As a result, over the past five years, the early cancellation rate of housing subscription accounts among foreigners approached 50%, with 27% canceling within just one year of signing up.
[Park Hong-bae / Member of the National Assembly National Policy Committee (Democratic Party of Korea): "This is a typical case of misselling, soliciting products with virtually no practical benefit to customers, and the result of excessive competition."]
Banks maintained that they recommended the product because, even for foreign nationals, it offers the advantage of relatively higher interest rates compared to regular deposit accounts.
(Video by Kim Hak-mo and Kim Yong-woo | Video Editing by Lee Seung-jin | Design by JUNHO)
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