Seoul Court Acquits 'Jonbeo Kim' in 340 Billion Won Scam Coin Fraud Case

Acquittal for the Podo and Atube Promoters

A South Korean court has acquitted the token promoter known nationwide as 'Jonbeo Kim' of fraud in a scam coin case valued at roughly 340 billion won. The Seoul Southern District Court's 13th Criminal Division, under presiding Judge Seo Bo-min, declared Park, 45, and Han, 42, chief executive of Entblock, the issuer of the Podo (POD) token, not guilty on Thursday, 2026-10-15. Moon, who headed the platform developer implicated in the Atube (ATT) affair, was cleared on the same counts. The verdict closes the first-instance stage of one of Korea's most notorious token manipulation cases. The nickname Jonbeo Kim, a jab at Park's declared refusal to ever sell his holdings, spread widely after he posted photographs of expensive cars across social media and online communities, presenting himself as a man who had grown wealthy in the token business. Prosecutors had asked for a 20-year prison term and about 18.8 billion won in forfeiture from Park, whom they cast as the ringleader of price manipulation across two tokens. They alleged roughly 80.9 billion won was extracted from investors through Podo and about 260 billion won through Atube, using false disclosures and coordinated trading to inflate prices. Han, in the prosecutors' account, issued Podo in December 2020, lifted its price through false promotion and market manipulation, then sold roughly 21.6 billion won worth of the token to ordinary buyers on an exchange. Han and an Entblock associate were additionally charged with fabricating the documents used to win the listing. The court concluded that deception over the coins' market prices could not be confirmed on the evidence, and that even where deceptive conduct existed, linking it to each investor's decision to buy proved too difficult.

Why the Fraud Charges Failed

The judges broke the alleged deception into four questions: whether the substance of the two projects was misrepresented, whether the coins' price and supply were manipulated, whether any deception actually caused investors to buy, and whether breach of trust arose in the handling of POD proceeds. On substance, the court did find grounds for deception. It concluded that Park and his co-defendants had overstated the business prospects and profitability of the projects in the whitepaper and Telegram channels, advertising staking and yield farming-style returns they lacked the capacity to deliver, while saying little about how sale proceeds were spent or whether the work was progressing at all. The panel stressed that it judged conduct at issuance, listing and disposal, not whether POD and ATT were scam coins as a legal category, a term no statute defines. On market conduct, the case collapsed. Evidence offered by prosecutors could not specify which acts moved POD and ATT prices on the exchange, and the court reasoned that even where wash trading shaped part of the price, an investor who placed an order at the quoted price bought at a market that was not factually false. Causation failed next. Confirmed victim testimony showed many buyers learned of the coins through blogs, YouTube, online communities or acquaintances rather than the defendants' materials, and some purchased for reasons that were never established. Even buyers who read the whitepaper may have been chasing short-term trading profits, the panel found, because the text stopped short of promising the project would definitely be completed. On breach of trust, the court found Park, Han and the associate had agreed that Park's side would own part of the issued supply, which undermined the theory that Entblock's assets were misappropriated. Only the obstruction count survived. Han handed Coinone false salary and spending records during the September 2021 listing maintenance review, after which Podo escaped caution-item designation, and the court found the falsified papers interfered with the exchange's review work. Han received 6 months in prison suspended for 2 years; the associate drew 4 months suspended for 1 year.

Our reading is that causation, not any finding that the tokens were honest, carried this verdict. The court came close to describing the conduct as a rug pull, accepting that the whitepaper promises were hollow and that the operators had no real intention of completing the projects, yet it acquitted because Korean fraud law demands proof that each victim relied on the deception. An appeal remains open to prosecutors, and the false-document convictions confirm that exchange listing reviews stay a viable theory of liability even when the fraud counts fail. Future cases will likely be built victim by victim, with testimony that ties each purchase to specific misstatements.