The Chungnam Provincial Police Agency announced on the 12th that they had apprehended a group of 45 individuals who sold unregistered and ghost vehicles to undocumented foreigners, and among them, 17 have been arrested.
Additionally, the police have requested seizure preservation for eight confiscated vehicles and transferred 52 vehicles to the relevant local governments.
According to the police, since around March 2023, the suspects allegedly sold over 500 unregistered and ghost vehicles to undocumented foreigners in Korea via Facebook (SNS), charging 5 to 7 million won per vehicle.
Police investigations revealed that the suspects acquired unregistered vehicles by reassembling license plates from ghost vehicles?those with lapsed liability insurance, traffic violations, unpaid car taxes, administrative cancellation, suspended operation, or even stolen vehicles. These were then sold to undocumented foreigners in Korea through Facebook accounts operated overseas.
In particular, some sellers exploited the fact that undocumented foreigners could not report to law enforcement. They installed GPS trackers on the vehicles in advance, forcibly retrieved the vehicles, and resold them to other foreigners.
The police launched the investigation considering the high likelihood that foreign drug traffickers might use unregistered and ghost vehicles to distribute drugs nationwide and commit various crimes to evade law enforcement tracking.
The police arrested five drug offenders and apprehended most of the organization members after identifying them. Some suspects were found to have been wanted for hit-and-run accidents while driving unregistered or ghost vehicles.
A police official stated, "We will continue to track down all unregistered and ghost vehicles that have been distributed so far and plan to investigate other SNS accounts involved in the distribution of such vehicles."
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