Smishing Damage Growing Larger... Last Year's Losses Total 54.6 Billion Won

Smishing Damage Soars
50-Fold Increase in the Past Five Years

The methods of smishing crimes through text messages are evolving day by day, and the scale of damage caused by smishing has increased by 50 times over the past five years.

On the 21st, the office of Kim Jong-yang, a member of the People Power Party belonging to the National Assembly's Public Administration and Security Committee, disclosed this information citing statistics from the National Police Agency. Smishing is a compound word of SMS (Short Message Service) and phishing, a fraudulent method that sends text messages to install malicious applications (apps) on the recipient's mobile phone or cause personal information leakage.

Smishing Texts Impersonating Delivery Services

The number of smishing crime cases and the amount of damage have been rapidly increasing every year recently. According to the Criminal Justice Information System (KICS), the number of smishing crime cases last year was 4,396. This is nearly five times higher compared to 822 cases five years ago in 2020. During the same period, the damage amount increased about 50 times from 1.1 billion KRW in 2020 to 54.6 billion KRW in 2024. In particular, the damage amount from smishing crimes last year recorded the highest ever.

Recently, smishing impersonating public institutions such as year-end tax settlement and fines/penalty inquiries accounts for more than half. From 2022 to 2024, the status of detected text message fraud by relevant authorities shows that the type impersonating government/public institutions such as fines and penalties totaled about 1.62 million cases (59.4%), the highest number. Next was account hijacking impersonating social networking service (SNS) companies with about 460,000 cases (16.9%), and impersonation of acquaintances such as wedding invitations and obituaries reached about 420,000 cases (15.5%).

However, recovering the damages from smishing crimes is practically close to impossible. Most smishing crime organizations are based overseas, making arrests difficult, and the damage funds are leaked to overseas servers or virtual assets (cryptocurrency), making it difficult to trace the flow of funds. Although the arrest rate for smishing crimes increased more than twice from 5.2% in 2020 to 11.6% in 2024, 88.4% of smishing crimes remain unresolved.

Assemblyman Kim said, "The recent surge in smishing crimes seriously threatens people's livelihoods," and added, "To eradicate internationally organized criminal organizations, it is necessary to strengthen international cooperative investigations."