Gyeonggi Province is pressing the central government to extend its support for jeonse fraud victims to foreign nationals, arguing that the current law recognizes them as victims yet locks them out of the help that matters most.
The demand highlights a gap that has left hundreds of foreign residents bearing losses without the safety net their Korean neighbors receive. For a province that is home to a large share of the country's foreign population, the exclusion has become a pointed local grievance.
A system that can swallow a life's savings
The stakes are set by how jeonse works. Under the system, a tenant hands a landlord a large lump-sum deposit instead of paying monthly rent, expecting it back at the end of the lease. When a landlord cannot return it, through fraud or a fall in property values, the tenant can lose hundreds of millions of won, often a household's entire savings.
The scale of the damage is national. As of July 31, the government had recognized 40,278 victims of jeonse fraud, a figure that captures how widely the scheme has spread through the rental market.
Where foreigners fall through
Foreign residents are a small but real slice of that total. They account for 544 recognized cases, about 1.4 percent, and more than half of them, over 270, are in Gyeonggi Province alone. That concentration is no accident, given that Gyeonggi was home to more than 710,000 foreign residents in 2025, some 34.6 percent of the national total.
The problem is what the law does next. The Special Act on Support for Jeonse Fraud Victims recognizes foreign nationals as victims, but it shuts them out of the core benefits, public rental housing and financial help from the Housing and Urban Fund. In practice, recognition without relief.
What the province wants
Gyeonggi has put forward concrete fixes. It wants the state-run Korea Land and Housing Corporation to be able to buy properties tied to the fraud and convert them into emergency housing, and it is calling for wider financial support, including low-interest jeonse loans and refinancing programs that foreign victims could actually use.
A provincial housing official framed the case in plain terms, saying these people are legal residents here, with jobs, families and established lives in Korea. The argument is that residency and contribution, not nationality, should decide who the safety net catches.
A cautious reply from Seoul
The central government has not embraced the idea. The land ministry said expanding the benefits would need to be weighed carefully against the purposes of the existing law, noting that the statute currently limits assistance to Korean nationals.
The exchange sets up a familiar tension between a province managing the human reality on the ground and a ministry guarding the boundaries of a national program. For the 270-plus foreign victims in Gyeonggi, the outcome will decide whether the recognition they already have ever turns into the help they cannot yet claim.