Korea's biggest piracy operator is finally home — and behind bars

For years, readers who didn’t want to pay for their webcomics and manga knew exactly where to go.

Until it shut down in April, Newtoki and its sister websites offered pirated copies of Korea’s most popular webtoons, along with Japanese manga and web novels.

The man said to be running them stayed shrouded in mystery for years, thought to have fled to Japan and taken citizenship there to put himself out of reach.

That run is finally over. The alleged operator is now in Korea, where he has been handed to prosecutors for indictment, police said Monday.

The man, identified only as a Japanese national in his 30s, was extradited from Japan earlier this month and referred to prosecutors by the Gyeongbuk Provincial Police Agency’s cybercrime unit.

It is the first time a Japanese citizen has been handed over to Korea under an extradition treaty the two countries signed in 2002.

The suspect faces charges of copyright infringement and promoting illegal gambling. The latter charge points to how these sites typically make their money: the pirated chapters are free to read, but the pages are packed with banner ads for unlicensed betting operations, which generate the bulk of the revenue.

The websites were a linked network of affiliated platforms. Newtoki, the best-known of them, carried pirated webtoons; Manatoki handled Japanese manga, and Booktoki hosted web novels.

All three ran under the same operation, and investigators believe the suspect was behind all of it. Between March 2019 and July 2021, he is accused of uploading some 1,400 pirated comics and webtoons to Manatoki alone.

The suspect left for Japan to stay ahead of Korean investigators and acquired Japanese citizenship in June 2022, then kept the sites running from there, according to police.

Police eventually tracked him to a hideout in Japan and, working with Japanese authorities, took him into custody. He was returned to Korea on June 11.

The referral follows the collapse of the network itself. Newtoki, Manatoki and Booktoki all went dark in late April, when the operators abruptly pulled the plug, posting a notice that the sites would close by midnight and all user data would be deleted.

The shutdown was widely seen as a sign of the growing pressure from Korean publishers, who have become more proactive about pursuing piracy operators abroad. Lately, major content providers like Naver Webtoon and Kakao Entertainment have moved away from waiting on slow international treaties and started taking matters into their own hands, hiring local law firms and investigators and handing the findings to local authorities.

The closure also came as Seoul and Tokyo moved to close ranks on the issue. At a summit earlier this year, President Lee Jae Myung and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi agreed to widen cooperation on protecting intellectual property.

Police said they would press on with the investigation, working to track down the proceeds of the suspect’s operation.