President Lee Jae-myung said on the 14th that the government will "track down criminals to the end, repatriate them to Korea and thoroughly recover criminal proceeds," after a group that ran a 3.1 trillion won illegal gambling site was arrested abroad and sent back to Korea a decade after fleeing.
Lee shared a news report on X, formerly Twitter, about a government-wide task force on transnational crime that arrested and repatriated the suspects through cooperation with authorities in the United Arab Emirates. "Hiding overseas does not let you escape the judgment of the law," he wrote. He called it "an achievement made possible by close cooperation between the task force and the UAE government," adding, "I am deeply grateful to the UAE government, and on behalf of our people I extend my thanks to President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan."
Lee said the government would "respond without any gaps even to crimes that cross borders and protect the daily lives of our people," reiterating his commitment to a firm response to transnational crime and to recovering criminal proceeds.
The three repatriated suspects are the ringleader, the deputy and a site developer who ran an illegal gambling operation worth 3.1 trillion won ($2.2 billion) from the Philippines, Malaysia and other countries while laundering the proceeds.
The three fled abroad in 2016 to evade investigators and spent the next decade in hiding, using third-country passports to disguise their identities. Investigators arrested them through "Operation HALAK" — the word means ruin in Arabic — under which they shared intelligence with UAE police in real time.