Medical records of some 44 million people in South Korea were illegally collected and leaked outside of the country, prosecutors said Thursday.

The pangovernmental investigative team on personal information crimes said they summarily indicted 24 people on charges of leaking personal data to a U.S.-based company, including patients’ resident registration number, names of their diseases and their prescription records.

The accused include the head of the Korea Pharmaceutical Information Center, which is a Korea Pharmaceutical Association-affiliated organization that collects and provides information on medicine manufactured in and outside Korea. The KPIC is believed to have collected some 4.3 billion records from January 2011 to November 2014.

Also indicted was the head of a company that supplies a program that organizes information of patients’ medical treatment for insurance purposes. The company allegedly supplied the program to 7,500 hospitals across the country and illegally acquired 720 million records of treatments and prescriptions from March 2008 to December 2014.

Each of the two organizations are suspected of selling their data to a U.S.-based statistics company for 1.6 billion won ($1.37 million) and 330 million won, respectively. The U.S. company is believed to have statistically analyzed the information to figure out which medications are most frequently used. It then allegedly sold them to Korean pharmaceutical companies and made 7 billion won in profit.

Investigators also found that SK Telecom, the nation’s top mobile carrier, illegally collected 7,802 prescription records from 23,060 hospitals by using its electronic prescription services. The company allegedly planted a module in the prescription program that sent the records to a separate server it ran, which were sold to local pharmacies for about 3.6 billion won.

SK Telecom has denied the allegations that it sold prescription records.

By Yoon Min-sik

(minsiyoon@heraldcorp.com)