Target shell companies behind scam accounts

The Dong-A Ilbo Hero Content Team has reported that roughly 320,000 bank accounts opened in the names of shell companies enter circulation each year and end up in the hands of voice-phishing gangs and other criminal networks. The investigation also uncovered a related problem: even after a shell company has been formally shut down, the accounts it opened often remain active and can continue to be used for crime. These so-called zombie accounts are not the result of a single regulatory failure. They are the product of a system in which responsibility is divided among multiple agencies and critical information does not move quickly enough between them.

The United Kingdom addresses the problem at its source. Rather than pursuing fraudulent accounts one by one, authorities move against the shell companies that generate them. Companies House shares information with tax authorities and law enforcement agencies, allowing it to monitor suspicious entities and remove them from the corporate register. Last year alone, 11,500 shell companies were dissolved through that process. South Korea operates very differently. Corporate registration, tax administration and financial monitoring are handled by separate institutions, often with limited coordination. Closing down a shell company can therefore take months.

Australia has taken coordination a step further. Since establishing a nationwide anti-scam information-sharing network in 2023, bringing together banks, telecommunications providers and online platforms, annual scam losses have fallen from more than 3 trillion won to the 2 trillion won range. When one bank identifies a fraudulent account, the information is distributed across the network almost immediately, reducing the chances that criminal groups can move funds elsewhere. Singapore relies on a similarly integrated model. At the police force's Anti-Scam Command, officers and employees from six major commercial banks work together in the same operation, helping recover hundreds of billions of won in fraud proceeds each year.

South Korea launched its own information-sharing network last October to combat voice phishing, linking banks and investigative agencies. Yet key institutions remain absent. Without the courts and the National Tax Service in the system, authorities have limited visibility into the shell companies that supply fraudulent accounts. The first step is straightforward: build a real-time monitoring system capable of identifying suspected shell-company operations and shutting them down quickly. The reporting team found one operator who established more than eight shell companies to mass-produce fraudulent accounts and appeared 60 times on the Financial Supervisory Service's voice-phishing watchlist without facing meaningful consequences. That should not be possible. Until responsibilities are clearly assigned and agencies are given both the authority and obligation to act, the loopholes that sustain these scam-account factories will remain open.