Overview
- A Seoul Southern District Court convicted Delio CEO Jeong Sang-ho and sentenced him to 15 years in prison, finding him guilty of fraud, embezzlement and registering the company with a falsified accounting report.
- The court ordered Jeong detained after the ruling because judges said he posed a flight risk.
- Judges excluded evidence obtained from Gabia, the company that hosted Delio’s servers, because prosecutors did not let Delio participate in the search or provide an inventory of seized items, and the court ruled the platform database and anything derived from it had no evidentiary value.
- That evidentiary ruling wiped out the main indictment that alleged about 250 billion won taken from roughly 2,800 users and left prosecutors’ fallback case covering about 1,100 victims and roughly 70 billion won as the basis for conviction.
- The verdict found Jeong obtained Delio’s registration dishonestly by overstating coin holdings in a falsified accounting report and the case adds to wider scrutiny of collapsed South Korean crypto yield platforms and how prosecutors must gather digital evidence to hold executives accountable.