On May 21, the 6th Criminal Division of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office announced, “On the 20th, we indicted former entertainment agency CEO Mr. Kim and 10 others without detention on charges including obstruction of business by computer interference.”
According to the prosecutor’s office, from December 2018 to December 2019, Mr. Kim and his associates used over 500 virtual PCs, a large number of purchased IP addresses, and 1,627 pieces of illegally obtained personal information to repeatedly stream 15 songs on major domestic music sites 1,727,985 times.
They recruited clients through brokers to manipulate music chart rankings and committed the crime by allocating multiple IPs to multiple virtual PCs and accessing music sites with numerous accounts. This method rendered the music sites’ abuse response systems, which block access from multiple accounts, ineffective.
A prosecution official stated, “Through this investigation, we have concretely confirmed that the longstanding suspicions of systematic music chart manipulation in the music market were indeed true.”
Source: Daum
