Police said the group planted false information on portal blogs, online news articles and Wikipedia, and produced YouTube videos featuring a paid stand-in, so anyone researching the project found what looked like independent corroboration. The scheme followed FXRP's actual launch the month before.
The stand-in, 34, has been charged with fraud. Police put average losses at 173 million won ($119,000) a victim across the week the site was live.
Police froze 17.3 billion won of assets across overseas exchanges as soon as they detected the scheme. Another 10 billion won moved during the investigation and is unaccounted for, they said. Together that is the 27.3 billion won ($18.8 million) investigators traced through wallets linked to the group, well above the 12.3 billion won confirmed lost by the 71 known victims, which police say points to more.
