Nightclub owner gets 6 years for getting customer drunk, stealing from him and leaving him to die

A nightclub owner and employees who deliberately got a customer drunk to inflate his bill, then left him to die, have been sentenced to prison.

The Busan District Court's Criminal Division 6, presided over by Judge Im Seong-cheol, sentenced the nightclub owner, identified only as A, to six years in prison on charges of abandonment causing death and computer-related fraud, Yonhap reported Friday. Employee B received two years, two other employees one year each, and a fifth employee 10 months.

In October 2024, A and the others lured customer C to the nightclub and had him drink a bottle of whiskey and beer in a short period of time until he lost consciousness. They were indicted on charges of inflating the bill, charging it without his consent and abandoning the unconscious C, who subsequently died.

Investigators found that the club had already been running an organized scheme — known internally as "the operation" — of deliberately getting customers drunk and stealing from them, with proceeds divided among participants.

To conceal the unauthorized charges, the group brought several empty whiskey bottles into the room before processing the payment.

After C lost consciousness, they attempted to unlock his phone using his fingerprint. When that failed, they charged 910,000 won ($643) to his credit card without authorization and attempted to charge an additional 1.32 million won, though that transaction did not go through.

C was left unattended in the room for about three hours and 20 minutes after losing consciousness and ultimately died of acute alcohol poisoning.

The court found a causal link between the defendants' act of abandonment and the foreseeable risk of the victim's death. "They knew the victim had collapsed and lost consciousness, yet took no active steps whatsoever to check on his condition or rouse him," the court said, adding that it had weighed the defendants' attempts to coordinate their stories with accomplices after the crime, their deletion of mobile phone messages to cover their tracks, their failure to obtain forgiveness from the bereaved family and their lack of effort to make amends in determining the sentences.