South Korea's financial authorities will move to eradicate mule accounts after preventing 66.36 billion won in losses over nine months by sharing suspected voice phishing information. They plan to expand information sharing among financial, telecommunications and investigative agencies, and to pursue a sector-wide survey and institutional reforms targeting mule accounts across the financial industry.

The Financial Services Commission on Aug. 20 held the second council meeting on eradicating voice phishing, chaired by Vice Chairman Kwon Dae-young (권대영) and attended by the National Police Agency, the National Tax Service, the Financial Supervisory Service, the Financial Security Institute and major commercial banks. The meeting discussed the operational status of the ASAP voice phishing information-sharing and analysis AI platform and future response tasks.

ASAP is a platform for sharing suspected voice phishing information held by the financial industry and others. From October last year through the end of July this year, banks shared 463,000 cases of suspected information over nine months, leading to payment suspensions on 7,009 accounts. The amount of losses prevented reached 66.36 billion won.

Since Aug. 4, telecommunications firms and investigative agencies, as well as financial companies, have been able to share suspected information through ASAP under the revised law on refunding losses from telecommunications fraud.

Telecommunications firms shared about 100 cases of information, including phone numbers suspected of being used in voice phishing, shortly after the law took effect. Financial companies are linking the information with their abnormal financial transaction detection systems (FDS).

Banks are also strengthening internal response systems. Woori Bank built an integrated response system linking data from its FDS unit, which detects voice phishing, and its anti-money laundering (AML) unit. From the end of March through July, it shared 576 cases of suspected accounts at other banks identified by its AML system through ASAP.

Financial authorities are also pursuing additional measures to eradicate mule accounts. They plan to investigate the status of mule accounts across the financial sector and review steps to take necessary measures with related agencies, including the Ministry of Justice, the National Tax Service and the National Police Agency, for confirmed accounts. They will also push institutional improvements to curb the creation of new mule accounts.

"We plan to pursue inspections across the financial sector and institutional reforms in parallel to eradicate mule accounts that are becoming hotbeds for various crimes," Kwon said.