

By Jung Min-ho

There are over 5,300 active members of organized crime groups, according to police Wednesday.

The National Police Agency (NPA) said that 5,378 members belonged to 216 gangs as of July, represented no significant change from 2011. Police then estimated there were 5,451 gangsters in 220 groups.

Three years ago, the latest police crackdown on gangsters took place after a bloody street fight between two rival gangs in Incheon. .

Most gangsters extort money from entertainment establishments, street vendors and small business owners.

However, some of them are branching out into their own private loan, construction and entertainment businesses.

"These methods threaten social justice and public order. Therefore, they should be dealt with through more strict laws," Rep. Kim Hyun from the New Politics Alliance for Democracy told The Korea Times, after receiving relevant NPA data.

Kim said she asked the NPA for more detailed information about how the gangsters manage to make money, which will be disclosed soon.

Their crimes have become more sophisticated. They have expanded their businesses into the local stock market and mergers and acquisitions. They are seeking to advance to wherever they can make money, such as insurance fraud and gambling via the Internet.

Recently, police arrested 40 people who conspired with organized gangs for insurance fraud.

One of their schemes was to bump into other cars and get themselves hospitalized to claim money from insurance companies. They eventually threatened insurance company employees to get money by showing their tattoos, police said.

In the private money market, some gangsters pretended to be businessmen, and lent money at high interest rates while holding stocks as security. By applying such high interest rates, they extorted money from the lenders; and the number of victims of such cases is increasing.

Among the 16 regional police agencies, Gyeonggi office has apprehended the most with 879 gangsters from 31 groups, followed by the Seoul office with 477 gangsters from 22, and the Busan office with 385 members also from 22, the data showed.

The number of gangsters on the street has not seen any meaningful change since 2007, when there were 5,269. Those imprisoned were not counted.

The main reason there has been little improvement in the situation is that many gangsters arrested by police end up being released because many of their charges relate only to threats and minor violence.

According to the NPA, police have arrested 11,590 gang members since 2011 but only 2,042 of them (17.6 percent) were imprisoned.