Gang sentenced to prison for stealing addresses of 25 delivery customers and carrying out revenge attacks with filth

[Financial News] The defendants, who were indicted on charges of carrying out so-called “revenge-for-hire attacks”—being paid to spray filth on other people’s homes and spray-paint them, among other acts—were sentenced to prison terms at their first trial.
According to legal sources on the 7th, Seoul Southern District Court Judge Kim Ju-seok, sitting alone in Criminal Division 6, sentenced Jeong, 34, the ringleader of the revenge-for-hire group, to three years in prison that afternoon on charges including violating the Information and Communications Network Act and the Personal Information Protection Act. His accomplices, Yeo, 44, and Lee, 36, were sentenced to two and three years in prison, respectively. The court also revoked Yeo’s bail and remanded Yeo in custody.
They were indicted on charges of running an online private-investigation agency, receiving requests for personal revenge through Telegram, and then stealing victims’ addresses using a delivery company’s system. There were 25 victims in total, and investigators found that operatives who received the addresses went to the victims’ homes and carried out revenge acts, including throwing human feces at their front doors.
The court admonished the defendants, saying the victims appeared to have suffered great anxiety and fear. “Delivery addresses are entrusted to businesses out of necessity for everyday life, and protecting them is the last line of defense for safeguarding customer trust and peace in their daily lives,” the court said. “The defendants blatantly betrayed that trust and made the homes of victims—the places they should have considered safest—the targets of revenge attacks.” The court also noted that there were 25 victims, the crimes were repeated for at least four months, and revenge acts were carried out at the victims’ actual homes, including throwing human feces.
The court found that the ringleader, Jeong, played a key role in running the online private-investigation agency with Lee and handling client inquiries. After receiving a request from an unidentified person, Jeong passed on to that person the address received from Yeo, among other things. In sentencing, the court took into account that Jeong had reached settlements with 17 of the 25 victims and received statements that they did not want Jeong punished, and that Jeong had not taken part in the actual revenge acts beyond passing on the addresses.
The court rejected Lee’s claim that Lee was merely an accessory because Lee had neither conspired with an unidentified person to carry out the revenge acts nor participated in the operatives’ actions. Instead, it found that Lee had taken charge of the operation while running the online private-investigation agency with Jeong, and had led the overall crime, including by having Yeo borrow an account from the delivery company and provide addresses. The court treated as favorable sentencing factors that Lee had reached settlements with 13 of the 25 victims and that they had said they did not want Lee punished.
The court ruled that Yeo, as a personal information processor with a professional duty to protect personal data, had looked up information on numerous customers and provided the victims’ addresses. Yeo was found to have obtained personal information by posing as a call-center agent for a Baemin subcontractor in order to obtain data such as the targets’ addresses. In reaching its sentence, however, the court considered that Yeo had admitted to all the offenses and expressed remorse, had joined the crimes at someone’s suggestion while in financial hardship, that it was unclear whether Yeo knew the information provided would be used in revenge acts when becoming involved, and that Yeo had no prior convictions.
At an earlier sentencing hearing, prosecutors sought five years in prison for Jeong and three years for Yeo. For Lee, they had asked the court to impose separate sentences of six months and four years and six months, depending on the period in which the offenses were committed.
[email protected] Seo Ji-yun Reporter