SEOUL, South Korea — In South Korea, where people often remove their shoes before entering homes, restaurants or funeral parlors, it is a nagging problem: people walking off with others’ shoes, either by mistake or, sometimes, intentionally.

Still, Detective Kim Jeong-gu’s jaw dropped recently when he opened the warehouse of an ex-convict in Seoul and found 170 apple boxes packed with 1,700 pairs of expensive designer shoes, sorted by size and brand, and all believed to have been stolen.

“Shoe theft is not unusual here,” Detective Kim, 28, said. “But we gasped at this one.”

The 59-year-old suspect, a former convict identified only by his last name, Park, was a onetime used-shoe vendor who had been convicted twice in the past five years of pilfering shoes and operated around funeral homes, the police said.

Attached to major general hospitals, such facilities have 20 to 40 rooms where grieving families receive guests who bow on the floor in a show of respect for the deceased. They usually arrive in their best shoes and invariably leave them outside. They also linger for a while, eating, drinking and catching up with relatives, old friends or colleagues who have come for the same service.