Police Shift from 'Single Investigation to Combined Investigation'... "Strong Response to Fraud Crimes"

Strengthening Nationwide Clue Collection and Analysis Functions
Enhancing Suspect Apprehension and Investigation Efficiency

The National Police Agency's National Investigation Headquarters announced on the 31st that it will transition from the existing single-case investigation system to a consolidated investigation system.

National Police Agency, National Investigation Headquarters.
[Photo by Asia Economy DB]

Consolidated investigation is a method that collects and analyzes clues from crimes nationwide and then conducts focused investigations centered on the direct investigation departments of provincial police agencies. Previously, investigations were conducted by individual investigators at police stations with limited information, making it difficult to identify suspects or prove charges. Additionally, similar cases were redundantly investigated by each receiving agency, causing delays in case processing.

The police expect that with consolidated investigations enabling rapid and focused investigations from the early stages of a crime, the likelihood of apprehending suspects will increase and help prevent additional damage. Furthermore, the workload of individual investigators will decrease, speeding up the overall case processing. It is also anticipated that a comprehensive review of the severity of crimes, risk of recidivism, and habitual nature of offenses will be possible, allowing for a multidimensional understanding of motives and facts.

Investigation system before and after case consolidation.
[Photo by National Police Agency]

Since March this year, the National Investigation Headquarters has established a consolidated investigation system for six types of new financial crimes: investment leading fraud, similar receipt and illegal multi-level marketing, violations of the Capital Markets Act, violations of the Special Act on Virtual Assets, illegal private financing, and romance scams. They developed a function to standardize crime clues according to crime types and input them into the Criminal Justice Information System (KICS) for aggregation and analysis.

Recently, concrete results from consolidated investigations have emerged. From January to May this year, the National Investigation Headquarters analyzed 3,063 major financial crime cases such as investment leading fraud and directed investigations to consolidate them into 78 cases. They also consolidated and directed investigations of 23,628 cyber fraud cases into 3,829 cases. A representative example is the "Golden Triangle (border area of Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand) base investment fraud" case investigated by the Daegu Criminal Mobile Unit, where 311 overlapping investigations by police agencies nationwide were consolidated into a single case. As a result, the organization’s structure and charges became clear, leading to the arrest of 37 key figures within a short period, with 19 of them detained.

Woo Jong-su, head of the National Investigation Headquarters, emphasized, “For investigating fraud crimes characterized by online, non-face-to-face, and cross-border features, single-case investigations based solely on received clues are now meaningless. It is necessary to change the investigation paradigm to consolidated investigations that quickly and accurately collect and analyze clues from multiple cases to identify common suspects and conduct focused investigations.” He added, “We will boldly reward investigation teams that achieve results by consolidating clues with immediate promotions and team promotions. Additionally, we plan to hold the ‘Crime Clue Analysis Competition (tentative name)’ in the second half of this year to strengthen the crime clue analysis capabilities of provincial police agencies and promote the activation of consolidated investigations.”