Scammed by a Korean company: what you can actually do

If money has already left your account, speed matters more than anything else on this page. Read the first section now and the rest after you have called your bank.

The first 48 hours: your own bank, not Korea

The single mechanism that recovers money in a meaningful share of cases is a wire recall raised by the sending bank before the funds are moved on. Call the bank that sent the transfer, say the words “fraud” and “recall request”, and give them the beneficiary details from your payment confirmation. Every hour reduces the odds; scam accounts are typically emptied within a day or two of receipt.

If you paid by card, the same urgency applies to a chargeback through your card issuer. If you paid through a marketplace with any form of order protection, open the dispute inside the platform before its window closes — that window is usually shorter than you think.

Reporting it in Korea, from outside Korea

Korean police do investigate commercial fraud, and a beneficiary account that receives a police report attached to it can be frozen. The difficulty for a foreign victim is that Korea’s online reporting portal requires Korean identity verification. The realistic routes from abroad:

• Your own police first. File a report in your country (in the US, IC3; elsewhere, your national fraud-reporting channel). Cross-border requests to Korean police travel on the back of a home report, not instead of one.
• The Korean embassy or consulate in your country can direct a fraud complaint toward the relevant Korean authority, and a written complaint through them carries more weight than an email to a generic inbox.
• Anyone you know in Korea — an agent, a partner, a freight forwarder — can file directly with Korean police as the reporting party, which is often the fastest path to a real case number.

Build the evidence pack once, use it everywhere

Every channel above will ask for the same things. Assemble them once, as files, in order:

• The payment confirmation with the beneficiary name, bank and account number.
• The business registration number they gave you, and any certificate they sent.
• The full message history — export it, do not screenshot fragments.
• The website, storefront and any documents, saved as PDFs with visible dates.

What recovery realistically looks like

Honesty is kinder than optimism here. Recalls succeed when they are fast; police freezes succeed when the money is still in the first account; chargebacks succeed when a card was involved. Once funds have been forwarded through second and third accounts, recovery rates fall steeply, and no legitimate service can change that — which is worth remembering, because a second industry exists to charge scam victims for “fund recovery” that will not happen. Treat anyone who contacts you promising recovery for a fee as the second scam.