Man in His 30s Caught for Selling 1,700 Idol Concert Tickets on the Black Market and Pocketing 400 Million Won

【Financial News Ulsan = reporter Choi Soo-sang】 The Ulsan Metropolitan Police Agency said on the 26th that it had sent A, 35, to prosecutors under detention on charges including obstruction of business and violations of the Performance Act and the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection. He is accused of using a self-developed macro program to buy tickets for a famous idol concert and resell them on the black market for a profit of several hundred million won.
According to police, A carried out the scheme for about a year, from November 2024 to October 2025, on three major domestic ticket booking websites. To avoid detection, he used 1,198 accounts registered under foreign names.
A, who had computer-related knowledge, personally developed a macro program that bypassed and disrupted CAPTCHA, an anti-bot measure used by ticketing platforms to prevent fraudulent purchases. The program also had a function that continuously posted sales listings on a secondhand marketplace website every second. Using it, A could buy 70 to 80 tickets indiscriminately in just one minute and post them for sale at the same time.

Over the course of a year, A is believed to have circulated about 1,700 black-market tickets using this method. The tickets were sold on a secondhand marketplace website at prices ranging from three times to as much as 13 times the original cost. One ticket priced at 210,000 won was reportedly sold for as much as 2.73 million won. Investigators found that A's net profit, excluding ticket purchase costs, reached about 420 million won.
Cash bundles, luxury watches, jewelry and high-end shoes were found at A's home, and police confirmed that he had been driving an imported sports car.
Police seized about 200 million won in cash at the scene and froze the full 420 million won in criminal proceeds by applying for pre-indictment preservation of criminal proceeds.
Police are also expanding their investigation into possible accomplices after detecting repeated deposits into a specific account.



[email protected] Choi Soo-sang Reporter