Korea Customs Service Commissioner Lee Jong-wook, right, shakes hands with U.S. Customs and Border Protection Regional Attache Director Sung Ha at the Seoul Customs headquarters, Friday. Courtesy of the Korea Customs Service
Senior customs officials from Korea and the United States met in Seoul Friday to forge a tighter united front against a multibillion-dollar surge in illicit trade and sophisticated narcotics smuggling, Korean authorities said.
The high-level meeting at the Seoul Customs metropolitan office — marking the first visit by a senior American customs official to the agency’s leadership this year — brought together Korea Customs Service Commissioner Lee Jong-wook and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Regional Attache Director Sung Ha.
The discussions focused primarily on combatting origin fraud, a rising corporate evasion scheme in which manufacturers in third countries falsely relabel their products as Korean-made to exploit preferential trade terms and circumvent punitive U.S. tariffs.
The economic stakes of the enforcement gap are staggering, with Korean authorities uncovering trade security violations totaling 1.2 trillion won (about $864 million) between June 2025 and April 2026. Origin fraud alone accounted for 949.4 billion won of that figure — an astronomical 1,695 percent increase compared to the same period a year earlier. Lee briefed Ha on these enforcement milestones and proposed a more robust bilateral network for real-time information sharing to better intercept fraudulent shipments before they reach U.S. ports.
