Field note 07 · 현장 수첩

Scammed by a Korean Seller? — What Actually Works, and What Only Looks Like It Works

From the operator of 해결사, a fixer service in Korea. Free to use, no email required. 한국어판 →

The replies stop. The tracking number never existed, or it belongs to somebody else's parcel. You work out what time it is in Seoul, and then you work out how many days it has been. And the first thing almost everyone does is search for how to report a scam to the Korean police — which is the wrong first move, and this page is mostly about why.

Here is the shape of it. The routes that can actually put money back in your account have deadlines, and they don't run through Korea at all — they run through your own card issuer or your own payment platform. The routes that feel like justice run through Korean police and Korean agencies, and from outside the country they mostly stop at a wall. Spend three weeks on the second kind and the first kind quietly expires. That trade is the thing I'm trying to talk you out of.

0. Tonight, before you send another message

Fifteen minutes of screenshots, and do it before you tell them you know. Listings come down and chat histories get deleted within hours of a seller working out that the game is up.

Capture, as image or PDF files rather than links: the listing or product page with the URL and the date visible; the entire conversation — not the incriminating parts, all of it, including the friendly opening; the payment record showing amount, date, and exactly which account, handle or address received it; any tracking number together with what the carrier's page says about it today; whatever name, business number, phone and address the seller gave you; and the delivery and refund terms as they were shown to you at the time, not as they read now.

Links are not evidence. A link is a bet that someone else's server will still be telling the same story next month, and in these cases it usually isn't.

1. The clock is the whole game

Every route that works has an expiry date, and which one applies depends on how you paid. Find yours tonight and write it somewhere you will see it — not the day you intend to act, the day the door shuts.

If you paid by card, the networks set an outer limit for cardholder disputes that is commonly described as around 120 days, and for goods that never arrived the count generally runs from the date delivery was expected rather than the date you paid. Treat that as a ceiling and nothing more. Some dispute reasons carry shorter windows, and — this is the part that catches people — your own issuer can hold you to a tighter deadline of its own on top of the network's. So the number that governs you is not the one in this paragraph. Call your card issuer, say you want to dispute a transaction for goods not received, and ask what your deadline is. Do that today, even if you are not ready to file.

If you paid through PayPal, an item that never arrived has to be disputed within about 180 days of payment. An item that arrived but isn't what was described runs on the shorter of roughly 30 days from delivery or 180 days from payment — people remember the 180 and lose on the 30. And opening a dispute is not the end of it: a dispute that isn't escalated to a claim closes itself in about 20 days, which reads like a decision but is really a timer running out.

If you sent a bank transfer, there is no clock, because there is no mechanism. That isn't a deadline you can miss; it is the absence of a door. More on that next, and it is the single strongest reason to care about how you pay before you pay.

2. How you paid decides what is possible

This is the uncomfortable part of the page. Almost nothing about your outcome turns on how convincing your story is, how much documentation you gathered, or how plainly dishonest the seller was. It turns on which payment rail the money left on.

Card. The strongest position available to you — and notice why: not because anyone in Korea has agreed to cooperate, but because you are not asking Korea for anything. The dispute happens between you and your issuer under rules your issuer already signed up to. File it as goods not received, or as not matching the description, attach what you saved in section 0, and keep your account boring and chronological. Don't editorialise about the seller. The person reading it is processing a claim, not judging a case, and the file that wins is the one that is easy to approve.

Payment platform. The equivalent lever is its own dispute process — for PayPal, the Resolution Center. One thing to check before you file: whether what you sent was recorded as a purchase or as a personal transfer to another individual. The buyer protections attach to purchases. A seller who insisted you send it the other way was choosing the version without them, and in hindsight that request is usually the first clear signal rather than a payment preference.

Bank transfer to a Korean account. I am not going to soften this. There is no chargeback equivalent. There is no platform sitting in the middle with a rulebook and a reason to side with you. The money moved on a rail built to move money, and it did its job. Whatever else is on this page, that is the sentence I would want you to carry into your next transaction rather than this one.

3. The walls — what the Korean side actually does from where you are

Korea's police cybercrime reporting system offers an English option — there's a language selector, with Japanese and Chinese beside it. I didn't test how far English actually carries you into the form, and for what follows it doesn't matter. What matters is that the site looks open, which is why advice saying "just report it online from anywhere" sounds credible to anyone who has seen a screenshot of it.

What the system's own guidance says, though, is that filing online is the first of four stages — file, attend a station, investigation, closure — and that a visit to a police station is required after you file. Not recommended. Required. There is a clock on it as well: police guidance treats the online filing as provisional and expects you at a station within about two weeks to complete it. And it is meant to come from the victim in person — the system points people trying to report on someone else's behalf somewhere else entirely.

From another country, that is the wall, and no amount of English on the form moves it. You can absolutely file, and filing is real — it is not nothing. But filing is not finishing, and the gap between those two words is where a lot of people's card deadlines go to die.

Then there is the advice about getting a Korean bank to freeze the receiving account. There is a Korean statute that does exactly that, and it is real — but it was written around a particular kind of telecommunications-based financial fraud, and the version of its definition I was able to read carries a carve-out for acts dressed up as the supply of goods or services. Let me be exact about my own footing, because it matters here: the government's own copy of that text would not open for me, what I read sits on a third-party legal mirror, and the government's page indicates the law has been amended more recently than the copy I read. So I can't tell you its precise wording today, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What I can tell you is the part that is verifiable and is also the part that decides it: the freeze is requested through Korean financial institutions, not through your bank, and the machinery was not built for a shop that never shipped. It is not the clean lever the internet presents it as, and it is a poor place to spend a deadline you cannot get back.

Korea also has consumer agencies, including a portal for cross-border consumer problems. I tried to check tonight whether it is usable by someone in your position, and my connection to it failed on a certificate check — which tells you something about my evening and nothing at all about the agency. So I don't know, and I would rather write that than guess. What holds regardless: a consumer complaint body is not a refund mechanism, and it does not run on your clock.

4. The advice that will cost you the deadline

"Report it online to the Korean cyber police — they take international reports." Half true, and the false half is the expensive half. You can file. The system then says you have to show up. If a page told you the online form was the whole process, it was written by someone who never reached stage two.

"Get the Korean bank to freeze the account." A real mechanism, aimed at a different kind of fraud, initiated through institutions you have no relationship with — and, on the text I could get to, carrying an exclusion pointed at exactly the kind of transaction yours was.

"File with Korean consumer protection." Maybe — I couldn't confirm it either way. But even on the best reading it produces a complaint, not a refund, and complaints don't carry your card issuer's deadline.

And the one that takes money from people who have already lost some: anyone who approaches you offering to recover your funds for a fee. Posting about it angrily in a public thread is how you get onto that list — sometimes a list kept by people who were on the other side of the first transaction. No legitimate route to your own money starts with paying a stranger upfront. Not one, ever.