Jobless Man in 30s Buys Apartment with Scalped Tickets... Panics and Tries to Erase Evidence After News Report

A man in his 30s, identified as Mr. A, has been arrested and forwarded to the prosecution for using automated ticketing macro programs to buy up around 9,000 popular tickets, including idol concerts, and reselling them at exorbitant prices.

After graduating from college, he spent the past 7 years and 7 months without a regular job, carrying out the operation by mobilizing the accounts of seven other people, including family and relatives.

He resold tickets at nearly 30 times their original value, such as a 2019 BTS concert ticket originally priced at 110,000 won for 3 million won, and a ticket for the Tottenham Hotspur football team's visit to Korea the year before last, which was bought for 400,000 won and resold for 1.65 million won.

Total sales amounted to about 2.4 billion won, and police estimate that roughly two-thirds of this was criminal proceeds.

Police found that he used the money earned from ticket scalping to buy an apartment in Gyeonggi Province and two commercial properties. Authorities stated that they have applied for pre-indictment asset preservation on about 1.3 billion won, including the two commercial properties and bank deposits, excluding an apartment he had already sold.

Mr. A even registered as an e-commerce business to make his scalping operations look like a legitimate business, and circumstances were recently uncovered showing he attempted to destroy various evidence.

Police explained that after coming across news reports regarding the arrest of scalpers in March, Mr. A closed his business registration and formatted his computers and cell phones.

The Gyeonggi Bukbu Provincial Police Agency stated that it will continue its investigation into the country's largest ticket-scalping social media group chat room, which was shut down early this year, and take the lead in normalizing the performance market by relentlessly tracking criminal proceeds.

(Reported by Kim Gyu-ri | Produced by Lee Seyoung | Produced by SBS Digital News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.