A Seoul court has cleared a prominent South Korean cryptocurrency influencer of major fraud charges tied to two digital tokens that allegedly involved roughly 340 billion won in investor funds.
On October 15, 2026, the 13th Criminal Division of the Seoul Southern District Court, led by Presiding Judge Seo Bo-min, delivered a first-instance acquittal for Park, widely known in local crypto circles as Jonber Kim.
Prosecutors had earlier requested a 20-year prison term, portraying him as the central figure behind deceptive practices connected to the POD (also called Podo or Grape Coin) and ATT (Artube) projects.
Judges recognized that statements about the projects’ underlying substance, development progress, commercial outlook, and the intended use of raised funds could qualify as misleading conduct.
Materials such as white papers and Telegram announcements appeared to overstate platform feasibility, staking potential, and operational capacity while understating uncertainties and actual progress.
The panel also noted circumstances suggesting the defendants may have maintained the outward appearance of activity to facilitate the release of locked tokens.
These elements supported a finding that deceptive representations toward potential buyers were present.
Nevertheless, the court held that fraud under Korean law requires proof that particular individuals formed mistaken beliefs specifically because of those representations and then purchased the tokens as a result.
Broad public materials alone do not establish that every buyer relied on them.
When the panel examined individual victim statements, it found the evidence insufficient to connect any given purchase to the challenged claims.
Buyers who mentioned reviewing blogs, videos, or project documents could not be shown to have acted on specific false content rather than ordinary price speculation.
The judges therefore concluded that the necessary causal chain between the acknowledged misleading acts and actual token acquisitions had not been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt.
Separate allegations of price and supply manipulation fared no better.
Prosecutors could not sufficiently identify concrete actions that demonstrably influenced trading prices on the Coinone exchange.
Even where wash-style trading may have occurred, completed purchases at prevailing market rates were not treated as resting on false price information. Related charges of occupational breach of trust involving proceeds from POD token sales were likewise rejected.
Evidence of cost-sharing arrangements, funding contributions, and agreed ownership allocations among the parties undermined the claim that the defendants had violated duties while handling assets belonging to the issuing entity.
Two co-defendants did not escape all liability.
They were convicted of obstructing business operations after submitting inaccurate materials and supporting documents during Coinone’s review process for maintaining the listing of POD.
One received a four-month prison sentence suspended for one year; the other was given six months suspended for two years.
The court found that the false submissions interfered with the exchange’s ability to conduct a proper assessment.
The verdict underscores the evidentiary demands Korean courts place on large-scale digital-asset cases, particularly the need to link promotional statements to specific investor decisions rather than relying on the overall character of a project or the scale of trading activity.
