You paid a Korean supplier and they stopped responding

You have transferred a deposit and the replies have stopped. Before anything else, work out which of three situations you are in, because the response to each is completely different and the wrong one wastes the time that matters most.

The three are: the company is fine and something ordinary is happening; the company is in trouble; or there was never a company behind the emails. Two checks separate them, and both are free.

First, rule out the ordinary explanation

Korean business goes quiet for entirely mundane reasons, and foreign buyers routinely read panic into a public holiday. Seollal and Chuseok both shut production for a week or more, and many manufacturers close for a week in late July or early August. A supplier silent for four days across Chuseok is on holiday.

The guide to Korean holidays has the timing. If the silence does not line up with one, move on.

Check the registration status

Take the registration number and check whether the business is still trading. This takes seconds and is the most informative thing you can do.

If the company is still trading

Silence from a live company is usually a capacity problem, a dispute someone is avoiding, or your contact having left. Escalate deliberately:

• Write to the company’s general address rather than your contact, in plain, unemotional language. Include the registration number, order reference and dates.
• Telephone. Korean businesses answer the phone far more reliably than email, and a Korean-speaking intermediary changes the outcome more than any email will.
• Check the filed financials if the company is large enough to have them. Negative retained earnings or a current ratio below 1.0 suggests a company in trouble rather than one ignoring you.

If the company has closed

Act on the same day. Recovery odds fall sharply with time, and several routes have hard deadlines.

• Contact your bank immediately and ask about a payment recall. This is far more likely to work in the first days after a transfer than later.
• Preserve the evidence now. Export the full email thread with headers, the invoice, the bank confirmation, the messaging history and the website as it stands. Sites and chat logs disappear.
• Check whether you have trade credit insurance or platform protection. Both usually impose short notification windows.
• Take Korean legal advice if the sum justifies it. A closed company may still have recoverable assets or a director who can be pursued, and the registry extract from IROS is where the directors are named.

The sequence for a contract already in progress is in your Korean supplier has closed mid-contract.

If the registration never existed

Then the counterparty was not the company it claimed to be, and this is fraud rather than a commercial dispute. Report it to your own police force — that report is usually what your bank and insurer require — and to your bank’s fraud team as a matter of urgency.

Be aware of the middle case: the number was real but belonged to someone else. The genuine business whose number was used is another victim and will have no record of you. The guide to fraud patterns covers how this works and which checks catch it.

The check that would have prevented it

In most of these cases the registration status was already suspended or closed before the deposit was sent, and would have shown as such. It is a thirty-second check, it is free, and it is worth running again on the morning of any large payment rather than once at the start of the relationship.

is a routine request in Korea, not an accusation — see how to ask for registration documents.