“I’m your husband’s daughter,” says a stranger on the phone ... Husband’s North Korean defector identity revealed after 8 years [Decision to Leave]

[Financial News] The story of a wife who discovered that the husband she had lived with for eight years was not an ethnic Korean from China, but a North Korean defector who had left his wife and children behind in North Korea, has shocked many. The husband was found to have secretly closed a joint savings account containing 40 million won that the couple had set aside for their son’s tuition, and used the money to pay a broker to bring his daughter from North Korea.

On the 2nd, YTN Radio’s “Attorney Jo In-seop’s Counseling Center” featured the story of a wife, identified as Ms. A, who is considering having her marriage annulled because of her husband’s false identity and his unilateral disposal of their joint assets.
According to Ms. A, the two met while working at the same supermarket when they were around 30. At the time, her husband introduced himself as “an ethnic Korean from Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China, who had already acquired South Korean citizenship, and whose parents had died in China.” Attracted by his diligent nature, they married in 2018 and had a son the following year. They had maintained a peaceful family life, with her husband taking over and running the supermarket.
But their everyday life was shattered by a phone call last August. A young woman called Ms. A and said, “I’m your husband’s biological daughter; I recently defected from North Korea and settled in South Korea.”
After Ms. A pressed him for answers, her husband confessed the truth. He was not an ethnic Korean from China but a North Korean defector who had come to South Korea in 2012. He also confessed that while in North Korea, he had had a spouse whom he married in a wedding ceremony, and that they had a daughter together. What’s more, he had closed the joint savings account containing 40 million won, which the couple had been building up to pay for their son’s tuition, without consulting her and handed the money to a broker who helps people defect from North Korea.
“Everything about the husband I knew and trusted was a lie,” Ms. A said. “It makes my blood boil that he spent such a large sum without even discussing it with me. I want to know whether I can have the marriage annulled,” she pleaded.

Attorney Lee Hyun-ho of Shinsegae-ro Law Firm said it would be difficult to obtain a ruling that the marriage was void solely because the husband had concealed his background and past. A marriage can be declared void only in extremely limited circumstances in which the “agreement to marry” was absent from the outset, such as when the marriage was registered while one party was unconscious. Since the two registered their marriage with mutual consent, their case does not meet the grounds for declaring it void.
However, the attorney noted that a claim for annulment of the marriage on grounds of fraud or for a judicial divorce could be brought under civil law. “If concealing his identity constitutes fraud that had a significant impact on the decision to marry, she can seek to have the marriage annulled,” he said, advising that “she should also determine whether the marriage in North Korea is recognized as a legal marriage and whether he went through the special divorce procedure under the ‘Act on the Protection and Settlement Support of Residents Escaping from North Korea,’ in order to establish whether this is a case of bigamy.”
He added that she could defend her interests in the division of property with regard to the 40 million won in savings that had been closed without her consent. “The husband’s unilateral disposal of joint assets may be taken into account when each spouse’s contributions are assessed,” the attorney said. “If the husband took on additional debt to cover the broker’s fees, it would be a personal debt unrelated to ordinary household affairs, so she should actively argue that it be excluded from the property division.”
[email protected] Moon Young-jin Reporter