Police Make 761 Arrests in Int`l Matchmakers` Crackdown

The National Police Agency said Friday that it arrested 761 people, including 62 foreigners, after a one-month crackdown on illegal activities by international matchmakers.

Investigators have heightened surveillance over such companies after a 20-year-old Vietnamese woman was murdered by her mentally ill Korean husband July 8 just one week after they married.

Among those arrested, 54.4 percent were arranging international marriages without proper business registration. Slightly more than 25 percent were busted for running false or exaggerated advertisements of their operations.

Thirty of them (3.9 percent) were allegedly providing false information to customers, while 24 (3.2 percent) are known to have lent their business registrations to others.

In certain cases, Korean men were victims of inaccurate information from their matchmakers on the health or other personal conditions of their would-be foreign wives.

One head of an international matchmaking company in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, was arrested for having brokered a marriage between a Korean man and a Vietnamese woman with AIDS and tuberculosis in August 2007. The client was never told of her condition.

In September last year, the president of a matchmaking company in Busan failed to inform a Korean man that his would-be wife from China was carrying the syphilis virus.

pjw@donga.com