Representative Kim Nam-kook먹튀검증, who was found to have made large cryptocurrency trades, has been criticized for investing at risk in a new coin that few others know much about.
Experts say he likely had prior information before making the purchase, and point out that it’s important to look at whether anyone else bought the same cryptocurrency around the same time.
Reporter Chulhee Kim reports.
[Reporter]
The first cryptocurrency known to have been invested in by Representative Kim Nam-kook is BitTorrent.
When Kim first bought it in February 2021, the price was about 1 won per unit, but within two months, the price rose to 12 won.
Since then, Kim has used a strategy of buying so-called “kimchi coins” when they are at a low price.
In the case of MekongCoin, which he started investing in February last year, he bought 50,000 units when the price was around 6,900 won per unit, but the price nearly doubled in four days, earning him about 40 million won in market gains.
Another coin, Mavrex, was also bought just before it was listed on exchanges, and coincidentally, its price increased significantly in less than a month.
It is also a difficult form of investment to understand that in January and February of last year, billions of won in WeMix coins collected by bypassing exchanges were exchanged for ‘ClayPay tokens’, a new coin that was launched less than a month ago, at a loss.
In this regard, Representative Ha Tae-kyung of the Nationalist Party of Korea claimed on social media that “Kim’s purchase of ClayPay appears to be for money laundering purposes, not investment.”
Experts agree that it’s likely that Kim had prior knowledge, given that he bought the coin just before its peak and that he made a so-called bet on a non-mainstream coin.
This raises the question of when Kim bought the coin and whether there were other similar transactions.
If there are traces of multiple sources of information, it may be easier to identify the source.
[Byun Chang-ho / Cryptocurrency Expert: If you make a list of all the accounts that bought around that time and made a profit, you can probably find a certain group of politicians, so you have to keep an eye on those things].
In related news, prosecutors have also obtained records of offline virtual currency wallets, so-called cold wallets, to analyze the flow of Kim’s funds.
I’m Kim Chul-hee for YTN.