"Now Hiring Managers"...The High-Paying Part-Time Job Turned Out to Be Running a Crime Ring [Filing False Claims]

[The Financial News] A, who needed a part-time job, was once again combing through a job search platform that day. Then a post caught A's eye: it promised a managerial position with no particular requirements. The pay, it said, would match the title. With no time or room to weigh the details, A contacted the poster without hesitation.

It was not an ordinary company at all. It was an organized insurance fraud ring. They openly said they wanted tosystematically build a team to extract insurance payouts. It suddenly made sense why they were willing to hire someone like A with no work history at all. Even so, A did not back out.
They really were looking for someone at a managerial level. In the end, A joined a team with people holding titles such as department head and manager andtook on the role of recruiting, directing, and supervising participants in the scheme. The targets were vehicles that were already violating traffic laws, and the job was to deliberately cause accidents with them and then stage the crashes as if they were due to negligence or pure chance.
At first, A was so nervous that even their hands were shaking. But because the drivers had already broken traffic laws, they did not raise much suspicion, and A grew bolder over time. A urged team members to rack up more cases more aggressively. A also covered their room and board, scouted locations for the crimes, arranged hospitals for treatment afterward, and managed the overall planning of the fraud.

In this way, A and the rest of the groupillicitly obtained a total of 45 million won in insurance payouts. For each case, A received a commission of 300,000 won.
Perhaps because they had grown too bold, the group was eventually caught and brought to trial. The court pointed out, "When insurance fraud occurs, the damage is passed on to many good-faith policyholders, and there are serious harms, including the waste of human and social resources in the processes of paying insurance benefits, investigating claims, and recovering fraudulent payouts."
However, the court also noted, "We must consider proportionality with the sentence that would have been imposed if this case had been tried together with the previously adjudicated offenses, which involved the same method and occurred around the same time." The court added, "Before committing the offenses in this case, A had no prior record of the same type of crime and had not been subjected to criminal punishment exceeding a fine."
About seven months after the offenses in this case, and roughly one year before the present judgment, A had already been sentenced by another court to one year in prison on the same charges. Therefore, under Article 37 of the Criminal Act of the Republic of Korea, which provides that "when there is an offense that has not yet been adjudicated among concurrent crimes, the sentence for that offense shall be determined in consideration of fairness with the sentence that would have been imposed if it had been tried together with the offense already finally adjudicated," the court decided to reduce the sentence andimpose a six-month prison term, suspended for two years.

taeil0808@fnnews.com Reporter Kim Tae-il Reporter