South Korean woman, 90s, jailed for laundering drug money for son

A woman in her 90s was sentenced to one year in prison in Incheon for moving drug money at her son’s direction, a case that laid bare how family ties can be used to keep narcotics networks running across borders.

Judge Wi Eun-suk of the Incheon District Court Criminal Division 15 also ordered A to forfeit 386.42 million won, about $260,000. Prosecutors said A received cash in South Korea on nine occasions between April 2020 and February 2022, then remitted about 350.22 million won to accounts designated by her son, who is in his 60s and remains imprisoned in Cambodia.

The court found the money was tied to narcotics crimes and rejected A’s claim that she did not know its source. In its ruling, the court pointed to her son’s prior drug offenses, his overseas stay, her repeated trips to Cambodia, and the fact that she had been informed by phone that he had been detained there. The judge said those circumstances made her explanation hard to believe. At the same time, the court treated her advanced age, the absence of prior drug-related convictions, and the fact that she was acting under her son’s direction as mitigating factors.

The case is part of a wider investigation into a transnational trafficking scheme that investigators say continued even after the son was arrested in Cambodia in July 2020 on methamphetamine-possession charges. Authorities believe he kept coordinating drug trafficking from prison using a mobile phone and arranged at least nine shipments of narcotics into South Korea between April 2019 and July 2022. Prosecutors are seeking his repatriation to South Korea, where the broader case has already reached other relatives: the son’s daughter was indicted but acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence.

The sentence shows how South Korean courts are weighing age and family pressure against the need to deter laundering that helps keep drug networks alive. Even in a case involving a defendant in her 90s, the court drew a firm line: repeated transfers of large sums, especially when linked to a convicted son operating abroad, were not treated as minor conduct.