The Gangwon Provincial Police registered 26 domestic users as criminal suspects and referred 18 of them, a month after Korea's communications regulator blocked the platform. Police argue that staking crypto on an outcome the buyer cannot control meets the elements of gambling under Article 246.
South Korean police have referred 18 Polymarket users to prosecutors and registered 26 people in total as criminal suspects in an illegal gambling investigation, according to National Police Agency figures supplied to the office of Democratic Party lawmaker Youn Kun-young and first reported by the Seoul daily Asia Economy. The 26 had staked a combined 17.6 billion won, about $12.7 million at roughly 1,390 won to the dollar. The counts are current as of September 15.
One user accounted for a disproportionate share of that. Asia Economy puts the largest cumulative stake at about 5.7 billion won, near $4.1 million on the same conversion, or close to a third of the group's total. The case is being run by the cyber investigation unit of the Gangwon Provincial Police Agency, which has been working it since at least June.
Police are applying Article 246 of the Criminal Act, the general gambling provision. Their argument, as Asia Economy and the trade outlet Digital Asset both describe it, is that buying a yes-or-no event contract means staking property on an outcome the buyer cannot control, which satisfies the elements of the offense regardless of what the venue calls the instrument. Registering someone as a suspect is a step before any charging decision, and eight of the 26 have not been referred onward.
Identifying anonymous traders on a non-custodial platform was the practical obstacle, and police solved it from both ends. Digital Asset reports that investigators analyzed public blockchain transactions to attribute activity to individuals. Hankyung reported in June that the same unit had pulled transfer records from domestic exchanges to find users who had sent funds toward Polymarket, then issued summonses ordered by the size and frequency of their activity. That report described the case as the first nationwide investigation of its kind directed from police headquarters.
The criminal file predates the regulatory one. The Korea Communications Standards Commission blocked domestic access to Polymarket in mid-August after finding that the platform provided an illegal gambling environment, a decision MiningPool covered at the time and one that turned in part on Korea-specific markets such as a contract on Seoul rainfall. Cointelegraph dates the block to August 18. The police work was already under way by early June, so the users now facing prosecutors were trading while the platform was still reachable.
The defense being mounted is structural rather than factual. Kim Tae-rim, an attorney at AXIS Law quoted by Asia Economy, described the core question as how a court will assess the difference between Polymarket's contracts and conventional betting: positions are bought and sold against an order book at moving prices, and a holder can close out before the event resolves rather than waiting for a win-or-lose settlement. Asia Economy's account of that argument does not claim it has succeeded anywhere in Korea, and no Korean court has ruled on it.
Polymarket's own position has been about reach rather than structure. The Block reports that the platform has argued it should not fall under Korean gambling law because it is non-custodial, does not accept the won and discontinued Korean-language services. The commission rejected the equivalent argument in August. Cointelegraph reports that the commission pointed to what it called a winner-takes-all structure as the reason it treated the service as gambling.
What separates this from the fights in the United States is who is in the dock. American disputes over event contracts have been aimed at the venues and their regulators: Wisconsin's attorney general sued Polymarket, Kalshi and three other operators in April, the CFTC ordered Kalshi to keep trading through New York's suit in August, and the Ninth and Third Circuits now disagree on whether sports event contracts are swaps or bets. In Korea the platform is already blocked and the people being referred to prosecutors are the traders.
Prosecutors now decide whether to bring charges against the 18, and that decision has not been made. Neither the police data nor the reporting on it says how the 17.6 billion won breaks down between markets, or over what period the stakes accumulated, so the figure describes money staked through the accounts rather than net losses. The platform has been unreachable from Korea since mid-August. Whether the contracts its Korean users bought before then were bets under Article 246 is now a question for prosecutors, and after them the courts.
