SEOUL — A homeless South Korean man died of cancer without being able to use a single penny of his life savings of $100,000 because he could not prove his identity to his bank, officials said Wednesday.

Residents of the Yongbong district of Gwangju, in southwestern South Korea, knew little about the quiet man who had drifted into their neighborhood in 2007. He pulled a cart during the day to collect and sell scrap metal and other junk and slept in the cart or a shipping container.

“He never begged. When people offered him help, he said he had money saved and didn’t need help,” Yoo Joon-soo, a district official in Yongbong, said by telephone. “He said he was going to buy a house.” In mid-April, he looked so fragile that Mr. Yoo and others ignored his protests and called an ambulance. He was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.

The man then told the officials that his name was Na Hae-dong and that he had been born May 23, 1953, two months before the Korean War ended.