In May 2012 Korean police showed reporters a 51-second video of a funeral in China and said Jo Hee-pal (often spelled Cho Hee-pal), the man behind Korea's biggest Ponzi scheme, had died there the previous December.

His pitch: investors bought massage chairs and medical machines on paper, the company rented them to bathhouses, and the rent came back as a fixed monthly payout. Prosecutors later counted about 70,000 investors. Most of the money was cycled back to earlier investors; the unrecovered loss was put at about 840 billion won.

On 30 October 2008, in a Daegu hotel coffee shop, he handed 900 million won in cashier's cheques to a senior police officer, who was later jailed for 10 years. A few weeks later, in December 2008, he left Korea by sea from the west coast.

In China he got an ID card, a driver's licence and a passport under another name: Jo Yeong-bok, ethnic Korean.

The story police were given: a night of drinking in a hotel basement karaoke, chest pain, and death in an ambulance at 00:15 on 19 December 2011. The 2012 reports placed it in Qingdao or Yantai; prosecutors in 2016 placed it in Weihai. The hospital's death certificate had no Chinese police seal. Prosecutors said that seal is only used when a homicide is suspected.

TV crews then found golf caddies who said they had seen him after his reported death, and a Qingdao course record dated after it. None of those sightings was ever verified. In 2016 prosecutors closed the case: a lock of hair kept since 2011 was matched to him by the National Forensic Service.

Both sides are still there. Prosecutors say the hair and the witnesses settle it. His victims point out that nobody outside his circle ever saw a body; he was cremated in China.

Full case file, with every source: https://strangeworldfiles.com/jo-hee-pal-korea-ponzi-declared-dead/