Seoul Court Acquits Influencer “Jonber Kim” in $253 Million Crypto Fraud Case

Seoul Court Clears Jonber Kim

A South Korean court has acquitted the influencer known as Jonber Kim on all counts in one of the country's largest cryptocurrency fraud cases. The Seoul Southern District Court entered the not-guilty verdict on Thursday, October 15, clearing Park, a 45-year-old social media personality, of accusations that he masterminded pump-and-dump schemes built around two digital tokens, Podo Coin (POD) and ATube (ATT). Local reporting put the case size at roughly 340 billion won, about $253 million. Prosecutors had cast Park as the architect of both token offerings, alleging he made false promises to investors and propped up each token's market cap while the projects were promoted as blockchain ventures with commercial substance. Through the two schemes, prosecutors claimed, Park directly siphoned funds from a large pool of retail buyers. The prosecution asked for a 20-year prison term and forfeiture of more than $14 million in property. Park had cultivated an online image of extreme wealth, posting luxury cars on social media and telling followers his fortune came from digital assets, and that persona helped pull buyers into the offerings. The court saw deception in the paperwork but refused to connect it to the losses. Judges concluded that false statements appeared in the white papers and project materials, yet the evidence did not show those documents drove the token purchases or the price damage that followed. Even among victims whose testimony the court could verify, some bought after seeing blogs, YouTube clips, forum posts or word-of-mouth tips rather than the official documents, and others never explained how they decided to buy. That gap left reasonable doubt, and the panel cleared Park of the fraud counts outright.

Co-Defendants Convicted on Listing Obstruction

The detail of the judgment shows a narrower outcome than a blanket exoneration. Division 13 of the Seoul Southern District Court accepted that information about the business substance, progress and use of funds behind Podo Coin and ATube had been distorted, and that white paper and Telegram announcements presented the projects as further along than reality justified. Criminal fraud, the panel held, requires more: prosecutors had to prove, investor by investor, which information each buyer saw and that the misinformation actually produced the purchase. Some claimed victims could not be verified at all, and buyers who did read the white paper may have acted on short-term profit motives, so the causal chain stayed unproven beyond reasonable doubt. The manipulation count collapsed on similar logic. Mentions of buy-in prices and target prices in social media chat rooms, the judges wrote, are not automatically deception, and the submitted evidence could not specify how any concrete act moved the tokens' traded prices on Coinone. A breach-of-trust claim over the Podo Coin sale proceeds also failed once the court weighed the ownership structure of the coins. Co-defendants did not all walk free. An employee and the chief executive of Entable Block, the issuer behind Podo Coin, were convicted of disrupting Coinone's listing-maintenance review by submitting false materials. The employee drew 4 months in prison, suspended for 1 year; the chief executive drew 6 months, suspended for 2. Those convictions sit apart from the fraud acquittals, because the panel weighed each count on its own evidence. The verdict is a first-instance judgment, and whether the prosecution files an appeal has not been confirmed.

Why the Fraud Charges Collapsed

The ruling, read against its own text, turns on criminal causation rather than a clean bill of health for the promotion. The court acknowledged the misstatements and still demanded proof that each buyer relied on them, a standard that is difficult to meet in token cases where retail money typically arrives through social channels instead of a single document. The contrast with the same court's August sentence of 15 years for Delio's former CEO, convicted of misappropriating $49.2 million in client assets, is instructive, because the diverted funds were directly traceable in that case. Any appeal would face the same evidentiary gaps, from tracing proceeds to a specific crypto wallet to proving individual reliance, while South Korea's financial regulator deploys AI surveillance against manipulation on the country's largest trading platform.