Korea Criminal Act(KCA) Art. 315(Interference with Auction or Bidding) reads as follows: “A person who interferes with the impartial conduct of an auction or a bid through fraudulent means or by the threat of force or by other means, shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than two years or by a fine not exceeding seven million won.” So when a person(or a bidder) unlawfully manipulates computer programs of the agency calling for bids in order to obtain information about a minimum bidding price so that he can win the contract for sure. In the present case handed down by the Suprem Court of Korea, the defendants(bidder and manipulators) are found not guilty of Fraud by Use of Computer, etc(Art. 347-2 KCA) because a directness between a data processing and a property taking. The present paper agrees with the opinion of the Court, and moreover denies the violation of Fraud(Art. 347 KCA) in that the conduct does not make pecuniary loss to the agency. A bid-rigging is punishable by the Art. 315, and a violation of the Korean Anti-monopoly law and Construction law as well.

In this article, we analyze the decision of the Supreme Court in Korea with respect to the unauthorized modification of information and the immediacy of property disposal in a computer fraud critically. In the mentioned case, the defendant was charged with unlawful behavior to change the information by installing a hacking program on electronic bidding system of an administrative office. The author evaluated the defendant‘s conduct at issue not as an unauthorized change of information, but as an input of false information or illegal command input for computer. In terms of the immediacy of property disposal, this paper contends that we can’t say that computer fraud doesn’t hold, without exception, if a person involved in the property disposal process. In order to determine whether the computer fraud is established, we have to analyze the contents of the involved individual’s action in detail.