South Korea’s Nationwide Tax Carrier (NTS) is expanding its crackdown on tax evasion, warning that even crypto resources kept in icy wallets can be discipline to seizure.
In line with a report from native news outlet Hankook Ilbo, an NTS reliable acknowledged the company is willing to originate home searches and confiscate appealing drives and icy pockets gadgets if the company suspects that tax delinquents are hiding their crypto resources offline.
“We analyze tax delinquents’ coin transaction historical past thru crypto-tracking applications, and if there is suspicion of offline concealment, we are going to provide the choice to behavior home searches and seizures,” the NTS spokesperson reportedly acknowledged.
Below the nation’s Nationwide Tax Assortment Act, the NTS can quiz story knowledge from native exchanges, freeze accounts from tax delinquents and liquidate their resources at market worth to duvet their unpaid taxes.
NTS seized and liquidated over $100 million in crypto in four years
A icy pockets is a crypto storage manner that stays disconnected from the earn. This setup makes it extra refined for hackers to remotely entry the funds. Whereas it helps accurate crypto resources, the NTS acknowledged that it ought to additionally be outmoded to cowl resources, making tax assortment extra tough.
The relate marks a unique piece in the company’s enforcement strategy as cryptocurrency continues to originate mainstream adoption in the nation.
Hankook Ilbo reported that the assortment of crypto buyers in the nation soared to virtually 11 million as of June, up virtually 800% from 1.2 million in 2020.
The outlet additionally acknowledged that trading volumes in the nation climbed from 1 trillion won ($730 million) to 6.4 trillion won ($4.7 billion) in the identical time duration.
The surge in crypto adoption additionally ended in an amplify in crypto-connected tax evasion conditions in the nation. The company first started focusing on tax evaders’ crypto resources in 2021, confiscating roughly $50 million from 5,700 suspects.
Since then, the NTS has accelerated its efforts and increased oversight in crypto exercise for tax evasion in the nation. The report acknowledged that over the past four years, the NTS seized and liquidated $108 million in cryptocurrency from extra than 14,000 folk.
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Suspicious crypto transactions surge in 2025
The NTS eyeing icy wallets comes amid a surge in suspicious crypto transactions in 2025.
On Sept. 22, records from the nation’s Monetary Intelligence Unit (FIU) showed that virtual asset service providers (VASPs) in the nation filed virtually 37,000 suspicious transaction experiences (STRs) as of August 2025.
STRs are concept to be one of many nation’s key Anti-Cash Laundering (AML) instruments. In line with the records, STRs filed in 2025 contain already exceeded the blended totals of 2023 and 2024, hitting unique document highs.
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