Disgruntled employee posts fake threat online, calls police pretending to have found it

(Graphic by Park Ji-young/The Korea Herald)
(Graphic by Park Ji-young/The Korea Herald)

A fast food delivery worker who staged a bomb threat after being scolded has been placed in detention, police officials of Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, said Thursday.

Officials said the court issued a warrant for the suspect's formal arrest, citing risk of him fleeing. The suspect was arrested at around 4 p.m. on Sunday, three hours after making a fake threat of setting up explosives inside a fast food restaurant in Suwon.

The suspect is accused of writing an online post at around 1 p.m. on Sunday that read: "The delivery is late and the employees are rude. I'll set up an explosive here." He then reported the case to police, on the pretext that he had just found the threat himself.

The hoax forced the evacuation of some 400 people inside the building, with a SWAT team searching the venue for over an hour and a half. Officials tracked down the ID of the person who wrote the post and found that it was the delivery person who first alerted the authorities about the threat.

The suspect, a delivery worker for the same restaurant, told police that he held a grudge against his superiors after being repeatedly reprimanded for late deliveries. He is facing charges of obstruction of performance of official duties by fraudulent means, along with interference with business.

Police are also mulling whether to apply a public intimidation charge, under a recently enacted law that punishes those who issue threats to the public with up to five years in prison or a 20 million won ($14,300) fine.

There have been a number of fake threats involving explosives at public places recently. A bomb hoax on Aug. 5 about supposed explosives inside a department store in Seoul turned out to have been posted by a 13-year-old boy.

On Aug. 10, a person claimed to have set up explosives inside the KSPO Dome in Seoul, the venue for concert of boy band The Boyz, with the suspect still at large. The fax that carried the threat on the concert was found to have been sent from a number in Japan.

South Korean police are reportedly considering the possibility that the culprit in the concert venue threat may be the same person as the one who has been sending fake threats against public facilities here since August 2023, also using Japanese numbers. The individual or individuals behind these threats used the name of Takahiro Karasawa, a practicing lawyer in Japan, leading the lawyer to publicly complain about his name being misused on X.


minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com