How to Verify Korean Supplier Bank Accounts: BRN and NTS
South Korea is the one market in this series where the account layer is genuinely strong. Before a transfer, Korean banking shows the payer the registered name of the account holder — and the country's payments clearing house exposes that same lookup as an API that will confirm an account against a business registration number. It is a better payee check than European Verification of Payee, and unlike Brazil's directory, it is built to be used for verification. But the company layer carries a sting most foreign buyers never see coming: receive a tax invoice from a supplier that has closed, or from a name that is not the real supplier, and your input VAT is denied — and the Supreme Court has held that checking the registration certificate alone is not enough to prove you took care. This guide covers both.
Sources: Korea Financial Telecommunications and Clearings Institute (KFTC), Open Banking API; National Tax Service via the Public Data Portal; Value-Added Tax Act, Article 39.
The account layer: Korea returns the name
Korea has no IBAN. A domestic account is identified by a three-digit bank code and an account number whose length and structure vary by institution, so there is no single format to validate and no checksum you can run offline. What Korea has instead is something most markets in this series lack entirely: a real-time way to see who holds the account.
Anyone who has used a Korean banking app knows the pattern. Enter an account number to make a transfer, and the app displays the registered holder's name before you confirm. That is not a courtesy feature — it is a consequence of the fact that Korean electronic transfers are irrevocable once executed, so confirming the name in advance is the control. It is embedded in consumer banking, in corporate banking, and in the clearing infrastructure underneath both.
The KFTC account real-name lookup
The Korea Financial Telecommunications and Clearings Institute (KFTC), the country's payments clearing house, exposes that capability through its Open Banking platform. Two APIs matter for a payer:
| API | What you supply | What it returns |
|---|---|---|
| Account real-name inquiry | Bank code, account number, and an identifier for the expected holder — the leading digits of an individual's resident registration number, or a company's business registration number. | The registered account holder's name, so you can confirm the account belongs to that identified party. |
| Recipient inquiry | Bank code and account number, before a deposit transfer. | Whether the account can receive the deposit, and the recipient's name. |
The KFTC's own documentation gives the use case as validating a customer's refund account, and Korean fintech providers wrap it for exactly that: confirming, before money moves, that the account really belongs to the party you think it does. Individual banks offer the same thing to their corporate customers — Woori Bank's name-confirmation service, for instance, is aimed explicitly at companies making frequent or bulk transfers to many counterparties, and for accounts held at Woori it can confirm whether the resident registration number or business registration number matches.
Verification of Payee returns a verdict: match, close match, no match. The Korean lookup returns the name, and lets you match it against a business registration number. That means you are not asking "does the string I typed resemble the holder" — you are asking "does this account belong to the registered business with this tax number". For B2B payments that is the right question, and Korea is one of very few markets that lets you ask it directly.
The limits
Three caveats keep this from being a complete answer.
First, access. The KFTC APIs are available to registered using-institutions, and the bank corporate services to that bank's business customers. A foreign buyer paying a Korean supplier by SWIFT from London or Chicago is not calling the KFTC. If you have a Korean entity or a Korean payout partner, the lookup is available to you; if you do not, your bank's beneficiary-name matching on the inbound wire is the nearest equivalent, and it is a settlement control rather than a lookup you run beforehand.
Second, virtual accounts. A virtual account has no registered real name, so the lookup fails on it — not because the account is suspicious, but because there is nothing to return. Many Korean businesses receive payments through virtual accounts assigned by their bank or payment gateway, which makes this the false positive to watch for. A failed lookup on a virtual account is a data-format result, not a fraud signal.
Third, the name is the holder's registered name, which for a company is the corporate name as the bank holds it. Trading names, romanised names, and abbreviated names on invoices will not match character-for-character. Match against the registered Korean-language corporate name, not the English name on the letterhead.
Because Korean transfers are irrevocable, the country built a statutory recovery route. Since 6 July 2021 the Korea Deposit Insurance Corporation has run a mistaken-remittance return support scheme: a payer who sent funds to the wrong account can apply, and KDIC pursues return from the recipient on the payer's behalf, for amounts within limits it sets. One condition is instructive — the scheme cannot help where the recipient's real name cannot be identified. A payment that lands in a nominee or unidentifiable account is beyond it. Which is one more reason the name lookup before payment is the control that matters, not the remedy after.
Bank codes and international payments
Korean domestic accounts sit under a three-digit KFTC bank code, which is worth recognising because it appears on remittance forms and in the account-lookup API:
| Code | Bank | Code | Bank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 004 | KB Kookmin | 011 | NH NongHyup |
| 088 | Shinhan | 003 | IBK Industrial Bank |
| 020 | Woori | 090 | KakaoBank |
| 081 | Hana | 092 | Toss Bank |
An international payment to a Korean supplier is a SWIFT wire to the bank's BIC with the account number and the beneficiary's registered name. Two practical points: the won is not freely deliverable offshore, so most cross-border supplier payments are made in US dollars or another major currency and converted by the receiving bank; and Korean banks apply the beneficiary name to the inbound funds, so a mismatch between the name on your instruction and the registered account holder can hold or return the payment. Get the exact registered name from the supplier's business registration certificate, not from an email signature.
Where account verification stops, and business verification starts
Paying a supplier safely means answering two different questions. The first is does this account belong to the party I intend to pay? The second is is that party a business I should be paying at all? Korea answers the first unusually well — and that is exactly why buyers here are tempted to stop after answering it.
A bank account match, however good, confirms one thing: that the name on the account corresponds to the name you supplied. It does not tell you the business is still registered, that it is the kind of taxpayer that can invoice you, that the person who agreed the contract can bind it, that it is the real supplier rather than a lent name, or that anything about it has changed since you onboarded it. Every one of those is a business-verification question, and in Korea every one of them carries a tax consequence the account check cannot see.
Bank account verification tells you the money will reach the account you were given, in the name you were given. Business verification tells you whether the entity behind that account is registered, active, correctly typed, properly represented, and the real counterparty. Treating the first as a substitute for the second is the single most common gap in supplier onboarding — and it is the gap the disguised-invoice cases below are built on. MonitorPay is designed around closing it: account verification and registry-sourced company intelligence returned together, so the account result and the business result arrive as one answer rather than two separate workflows.
The company layer: two numbers, two registers
A Korean company carries two identifiers, issued by different authorities for different purposes, and confusing them is one of the most common errors in supplier onboarding.
| Business Registration Number | Corporate Registration Number | |
|---|---|---|
| Korean | 사업자등록번호 | 법인등록번호 |
| Format | 10 digits, XXX-XX-XXXXX | 13 digits, XXXXXX-XXXXXXX |
| Issued by | The tax office (National Tax Service) after business starts | The court registry (Supreme Court Internet Registry) at incorporation |
| Who has one | Every business, including sole proprietors | Corporations only |
| Used on | Tax invoices, contracts, commercial dealings | Corporate registry extracts, corporate seal certificates |
| How many | Can be one per establishment (head office and branches) | One per legal entity |
The consequences run in both directions. A sole proprietor has a business registration number but no corporate number, which is not a red flag — it is the entity type. And a corporation with several establishments can legitimately hold several business registration numbers under one corporate number, so an invoice from a branch carrying a different business number from the head office you onboarded is normal, provided the corporate identity is the same.
Reading the business registration number
The ten digits are not arbitrary. Under Article 8 of the Value-Added Tax Act a business must register with the tax office within twenty days of starting, and the number it receives encodes where and what it is.
The middle pair is the useful part. Codes from 01 to 79 identify an individual business; codes in the 80s identify a corporation; higher codes cover other bodies. So a supplier presenting as a limited company whose number shows an individual code in the middle has given you something to ask about — not necessarily fraud, but a mismatch between what the paperwork claims and what the tax office recorded. It also affects your own obligations: paying an individual for certain services can carry a withholding duty for the payer, so the entity type is worth establishing before the first invoice, not after. The final digit is a check digit computed by weighted calculation from the preceding nine, so a transposed digit fails before you query anything.
Checking status with the National Tax Service
The National Tax Service runs a free, no-login status check on Hometax, and publishes the same thing as an open API on the Public Data Portal. Two distinct services sit behind it:
| Service | You supply | You get back |
|---|---|---|
| Status inquiry | The business registration number only. | Whether the business is continuing, suspended or closed, its taxable type — general taxpayer, simplified taxpayer or tax-exempt — and the closure date if closed. |
| Authenticity check | Business registration number, opening date and representative's name. | Whether those details match the NTS record. |
The API allows a hundred numbers per call and a million calls a day, and the underlying data refreshes against the NTS register every thirty minutes — newly opened businesses can take a day or two to appear. That combination of bulk capacity and near-real-time currency is unusual among tax authorities, and it means the status of an entire supplier base can be re-checked at will rather than at onboarding.
Two of the returned values carry money. Closed means a tax invoice dated after the closure date is not a valid tax invoice, and the input VAT on it will be denied. Taxable type tells you whether the supplier can issue a tax invoice at all: a tax-exempt business issues a plain invoice, not a tax invoice, and a simplified taxpayer below the statutory turnover threshold cannot issue one either. A supplier of either kind charging you 10% VAT on a tax invoice is a contradiction worth stopping on.
The corporate register
For a corporation, the authoritative record of legal existence is the corporate registry extract — the 법인등기부등본 — held by the Supreme Court and available through its Internet Registry for a nominal fee, to anyone. It shows the registered corporate name, head office address, business purposes, capital, and the directors, including the representative director authorised to bind the company. It also carries a history: changes of directors, of address, of purpose, each dated.
That history is the part worth reading. A registered office moved last month, a representative director appointed the week before the bank-detail change request, a business purpose amended to add whatever you are buying — none is disqualifying, and each is exactly the kind of correlation the extract exists to reveal. Listed and audited companies additionally file with the Financial Supervisory Service's DART disclosure system, which is free and returns financial statements and shareholder information.
The business registration certificate — 사업자등록증 — is the document a supplier hands over at onboarding. It shows the registered name, the representative, the business address, the business type and item, and the opening date, in the tax office's own wording. It is what you should match the bank account name against, and it is the source for the opening date and representative name the authenticity check needs. But note the sentence in the next section: holding the certificate is not, on its own, proof that you took care.
Why this matters: false tax invoices and Article 39
Here is the provision that turns Korean supplier verification into a financial control.
Article 39 of the Value-Added Tax Act lists input VAT that cannot be deducted from output VAT. The relevant head is a tax invoice whose mandatory particulars are missing or differ from the facts. The mandatory particulars, under Article 32, are the supplier, the recipient, the supply value and the time of supply. Get any of them wrong — in particular the identity of the supplier — and the credit falls away, subject to narrow exceptions in the enforcement decree for clerical errors where the transaction is otherwise verifiable.
Korean practice distinguishes three states of a tax invoice, and the vocabulary is worth learning because it recurs in every audit:
- A genuine tax invoice records a real supply from the supplier named on it.
- A disguised tax invoice records a real supply, but the supplier named on it is not the party that actually supplied — typically because someone lent their business registration, or a third party's registration was borrowed or stolen. The goods arrived; the name is wrong.
- A fictitious tax invoice records a supply that never happened. The businesses that manufacture these for a living are known as data merchants, and most enforcement cases against buyers begin as spin-offs from an investigation into one.
The good-faith defence, and what the Supreme Court says it requires
The disguised case is where the law becomes a verification standard. The burden of proving a tax invoice is false sits with the tax authority. And a buyer who did not know the named supplier was not the real one, and was not negligent in not knowing, can keep the credit. So far, that sounds like protection.
The Supreme Court's position, applied consistently by the Tax Tribunal, is that where the circumstances gave the buyer sufficient reason to suspect who the real supplier was — how the invoice came to be issued, the price, the route the goods took — then merely confirming the supplier's business registration certificate, without actually verifying the place of business or facilities, does not establish that the buyer was free of negligence. In other words: holding the paperwork is not due care. Checking that the business exists, is open, and is the party that supplied you is.
That is a striking standard by international comparison. It means the free NTS status check, the corporate registry extract, and the account-name lookup against the business registration number are not best practice in Korea — they are the minimum evidence that you were not careless, and the difference between keeping and losing the input VAT when a supplier turns out to be a front.
The closed-business case is simpler and just as costly. A supplier that closed its registration on a given date cannot issue a valid tax invoice after it. Receive one, claim the credit, and the credit is denied as a matter of course — which is precisely why the NTS status check returns the closure date, and why it is worth running on the invoice date, not only at onboarding.
Verifying the invoice itself: the electronic tax invoice
Article 39 tests the tax invoice, so it helps that Korea makes the tax invoice itself checkable. Since 2011 every corporation has been required to issue tax invoices electronically, through Hometax or an approved service provider, and the obligation has been extended progressively to individual businesses — from 1 July 2024 to any individual business whose supply value in the previous year was 80 million won or more, and regardless of turnover to certain professions such as medical, legal, tax and accounting services. Once a business becomes an obligated issuer it stays one, even if turnover later falls.
An electronic tax invoice is transmitted to the National Tax Service when issued and carries a unique approval number. That has two consequences for a buyer. The invoice appears in your own purchase-invoice list on Hometax, so you can confirm the NTS holds it, dated and matched to the supplier's business registration number, before you claim the credit. And a paper tax invoice from a corporation is itself a signal — the supplier is either not the corporation it claims to be, or is issuing outside the system that would have penalised it for doing so.
Alongside the business registration certificate, a supplier can pull a tax payment certificate from Hometax confirming it has no outstanding national tax arrears — a standard request in Korean procurement, and the nearest equivalent to a good-standing letter. Then check the tax invoice it issues you: electronic, carrying an approval number, visible in your Hometax purchase list, and naming the same business registration number you verified. That is the loop closed.
What the account lookup will not catch
Korea's account real-name lookup is the strongest account-layer control in this series. It confirms the account exists, that it can receive funds, and whose name is on it — and it can confirm that name against a business registration number. For a supplier bank-detail change, that is close to a complete answer to the question "is this account theirs".
It answers nothing about the company — and this is the switch that has to happen in every onboarding process, not only Korea's. Once the account is confirmed, the question changes from whose account to what business, and the tools change with it. The account can be genuinely in the supplier's registered name while the business closed its registration last quarter, has been reclassified as tax-exempt, is a branch registration you have never dealt with, or is a data merchant whose account is real and whose invoices are not. And it says nothing about the tax test that actually costs money in Korea: whether the party named on the tax invoice is the party that supplied you. There are several company red flags a bank account match alone will not catch, and in Korea the courts have said, in terms, that the account and the certificate are not where diligence ends.
When everything matches and it is still fraud
The hardest case is not a mismatch. It is the payment where every check passes — real account, name matches the business number, NTS says continuing, company on the register — and the money still goes to a fraudster. A company can be entirely genuine and still be a vehicle built for one transaction, or a real registration lent to someone else.
Two things follow. The company facts have to be read together — age, address, officers, ownership, and filing behaviour — and over time, because a director, an address and a bank account that all changed in the month before a payment instruction only look wrong against a record of what came before. The free single-purpose lookups each answer one question well; none of them answers the combined one.
The practical test: if a bank-detail change request arrived tomorrow, could you see, in one place, how old the company is, who controls it, what changed recently, and whether it is still filing accounts? If that is four lookups and a spreadsheet, that is the gap this pattern walks through.
One integration, instead of one per country
Korea's KFTC lookup answers the account question well. The business question — status, type, representation, ownership — still has to be answered separately, and it shares no format with the next market you pay into.
MonitorPay returns both in one call across 49+ markets — account verification and payee name matching, plus company status, directors, shareholders and ownership from 200+ government registries. Bulk, API or platform. Every check logged. We do not move money.
A practical verification workflow
For a new Korean supplier, or a change to an existing one, a defensible sequence looks like this:
- Request the business registration certificate. Take the registered name, representative, opening date, business address and business type from it — in Korean, as the tax office recorded them.
- Read the business registration number. Confirm the check digit, and that the middle pair matches the entity type the supplier claims to be.
- Run the NTS status check. Continuing, not suspended or closed; and confirm the taxable type is one that can issue you a tax invoice. Free, no login, bulk-capable.
- Run the NTS authenticity check. Business number, opening date and representative together, against the NTS record.
- For a corporation, pull the corporate registry extract. Confirm the corporate registration number, the representative director, and read the change history for anything recent.
- Confirm the account against the business. Where you or your Korean partner can call the KFTC lookup or a bank name-confirmation service, verify the account holder against the business registration number. Expect virtual accounts to fail for format reasons.
- Then switch questions. Once the account is confirmed, stop asking whose account it is and start asking what business stands behind it. The remaining steps are business verification, and none of them is answered by the account result.
- Match names exactly. Registered Korean corporate name on the certificate against the account holder name and the tax invoice — not the romanised or trading name.
- Check the tax invoice is electronic and in the NTS system. A corporation must issue electronically; confirm the invoice carries an approval number and appears in your Hometax purchase list against the verified business number.
- Re-run the status check on the invoice date. A supplier open at onboarding and closed by the invoice date costs you the VAT.
- Keep the materiality file. Contracts, purchase orders, delivery and transport evidence, and traceable payment to the verified account. Under the Supreme Court standard, this is what shows you were not negligent.
- Read the facts together, not one at a time. A young company, a shared address, a newly appointed director and a change of bank details are each ordinary alone. In combination, and close together in time, they are the pattern.
- Re-verify on any bank-detail change. The account lookup makes this fast in Korea. Use it every time.
Bulk, API, or the online platform
Three ways in: bulk file checks for onboarding runs and supplier-base reviews, the REST API for verification inside your payment workflow, or the online platform for one-off checks with full audit logs.
Frequently asked questions
How do I verify a South Korean supplier's bank account?
Korea lets you confirm the registered account holder's name before you pay. The KFTC's Open Banking account real-name lookup takes a bank code, account number and the expected holder's business registration number, and returns the registered name; individual banks offer the same to their corporate customers. Match the returned name against the registered Korean corporate name on the supplier's business registration certificate.
Then verify the company: run the free NTS status check on the business registration number to confirm the business is continuing and can issue tax invoices, and for a corporation pull the corporate registry extract to confirm the representative director. Access to the account lookup requires a Korean using-institution or a Korean bank relationship, so a foreign buyer paying by SWIFT relies on the company checks and on the bank's beneficiary-name matching.
Is bank account verification enough to onboard a Korean supplier?
No, and Korea is the market where that is easiest to forget, because its account check is so good. Confirming that the account holder's name matches the business registration number tells you the money will reach the party you were given. It does not tell you the business is still registered and open, that it is a taxpayer type able to issue you a valid tax invoice, that the representative who signed can bind it, or that it is the real supplier rather than a lent name.
Those are business-verification questions, answered by the NTS status check, the corporate registry extract and the electronic tax invoice — and in Korea each one carries a VAT consequence the account check cannot see. Treat account verification and business verification as two separate checks that both have to pass. MonitorPay returns both together, so the switch from one question to the other happens in the same call rather than in a second workflow.
Does South Korea have a payee name check like Confirmation of Payee?
Yes, and in one respect a stronger one. Korean banking displays the registered account holder's name before a transfer is confirmed, because electronic transfers are irrevocable once made. The KFTC exposes this as an API that returns the holder's name and can confirm it against a business registration number, and banks offer name-confirmation services to corporate customers making bulk or frequent payments.
The differences from Confirmation of Payee are that Korea returns the name itself rather than a match verdict, and that it can anchor the check to a tax identifier. The limits are access — the APIs are for registered institutions and bank customers, not the general public — and virtual accounts, which have no registered name and cannot be looked up.
Why did the account name lookup fail on my Korean supplier's account?
The most common reason is that the account is a virtual account. Many Korean businesses receive payments through virtual account numbers assigned by their bank or payment gateway, and a virtual account has no registered real name, so the lookup returns nothing to match. That is a format result, not a fraud signal.
The second most common reason is a name mismatch caused by using the romanised or trading name rather than the registered Korean corporate name. Ask for the business registration certificate and match against the name printed there.
Does South Korea use IBAN?
No. Korean accounts are identified by a three-digit KFTC bank code and an account number whose length and structure vary by bank, with no checksum you can validate offline. An international payment is a SWIFT wire to the bank's BIC with the account number and the beneficiary's registered name.
Because the won is not freely deliverable offshore, most cross-border supplier payments are made in US dollars or another major currency and converted by the receiving bank. Korean banks apply the beneficiary name to inbound funds, so the name on your instruction should be the exact registered name from the supplier's business registration certificate.
What is the difference between a business registration number and a corporate registration number?
The business registration number is ten digits in the form XXX-XX-XXXXX, issued by the tax office after a business starts, and it is what appears on tax invoices and contracts. Every business has one, including sole proprietors, and a corporation can hold one per establishment. The corporate registration number is thirteen digits, issued by the court registry at incorporation, unique to the legal entity, and used on corporate registry extracts and seal certificates.
A supplier with a business number but no corporate number is usually a sole proprietor, not a problem. A supplier whose branch invoices under a different business number from the head office you onboarded is also normal, provided the corporate identity is the same.
How is a Korean business registration number structured?
The first three digits identify the tax office where the business registered. The middle two digits identify the entity type: 01 to 79 for individual businesses, codes in the 80s for corporations, higher codes for other bodies. The next four digits are a serial number, and the final digit is a check digit calculated from the preceding nine.
The middle pair is the practically useful block: it tells you whether you are dealing with an individual or a corporation before you look anything up. Under Article 8 of the VAT Act, a business must register within twenty days of starting.
How do I check whether a Korean business is still open?
Use the National Tax Service status check on Hometax, which needs only the business registration number and no login, or the same service as an open API on the Public Data Portal. It returns whether the business is continuing, suspended or closed, its taxable type — general, simplified or tax-exempt — and the closure date where applicable.
The API accepts a hundred numbers per call and up to a million calls a day, and refreshes against the NTS register every thirty minutes, so it is practical to re-check an entire supplier base rather than a single supplier at onboarding.
Why does the supplier's taxable type matter to me?
Because it determines whether the supplier can issue you a valid tax invoice, and therefore whether you can recover the VAT. A general taxpayer can. A tax-exempt business issues a plain invoice, not a tax invoice, and charges no VAT. A simplified taxpayer below the statutory turnover threshold cannot issue a tax invoice either.
So a supplier whose NTS status shows tax-exempt or simplified, yet who is charging you 10% VAT on what it calls a tax invoice, has given you a document that will not support a credit. It is worth stopping on before payment rather than at the VAT return.
Can I lose input VAT because of my Korean supplier?
Yes. Article 39 of the Value-Added Tax Act denies the input credit on a tax invoice whose mandatory particulars — supplier, recipient, value and time of supply — are missing or differ from the facts. Two situations reach the buyer directly: a tax invoice dated after the supplier closed its registration, and a disguised tax invoice where the supply was real but the supplier named on it was not the real supplier.
The burden of proving an invoice is false is on the tax authority, and a buyer who did not know and was not negligent in not knowing can keep the credit. But the Supreme Court has held that where circumstances warranted suspicion, merely checking the supplier's registration certificate without verifying its place of business does not establish freedom from negligence.
What is a disguised tax invoice, and how is it different from a fictitious one?
A disguised tax invoice records a supply that genuinely happened, but names as supplier a party that did not actually supply — usually because someone lent their business registration or a third party's registration was borrowed. A fictitious tax invoice records a supply that never happened at all; the businesses that issue them for a living are known as data merchants.
The disguised case is the one verification exists for. The goods arrived, the price was fair, the invoice looks right — and the credit is still denied unless you can show you did not know and were not careless. In practice that means being able to show you confirmed the business was open, real and the actual supplier.
Is checking the business registration certificate enough to protect my VAT credit?
Not on its own. The certificate is where to start — it gives you the registered name, representative, address and opening date in the tax office's wording. But the Supreme Court's position is that where the circumstances gave a buyer sufficient reason to suspect who the real supplier was, confirming the certificate without actually verifying the place of business or facilities does not establish that the buyer was free of negligence.
The practical reading is that the free NTS status check, the corporate registry extract, and confirming the account against the business registration number are the evidence of care, and the materiality file — contracts, orders, delivery evidence, payment to the verified account — is what you would produce if challenged.
How do I check that a Korean tax invoice is genuine?
Corporations in Korea must issue tax invoices electronically, and since 1 July 2024 so must individual businesses whose prior-year supply value was 80 million won or more, along with certain professions regardless of turnover. An electronic tax invoice is transmitted to the National Tax Service on issue and carries a unique approval number.
So confirm the invoice is electronic and carries an approval number, and check that it appears in your own purchase-invoice list on Hometax, dated and matched to the supplier's business registration number. A paper tax invoice from a corporation is itself a warning sign, because a corporation issuing on paper is either not the corporation it claims to be or is issuing outside the system that would penalise it for doing so.
What happens if I pay a Korean supplier's wrong account by mistake?
Korean electronic transfers cannot be reversed by the sending bank, which is precisely why the pre-transfer name check exists. But there is a statutory recovery route: since 6 July 2021 the Korea Deposit Insurance Corporation has operated a mistaken-remittance return support scheme, under which a payer can apply and KDIC pursues return of the funds from the recipient on the payer's behalf, within amount limits KDIC sets.
The scheme has conditions, and one is telling: it cannot assist where the recipient's real name cannot be identified. Funds that land in a nominee or unidentifiable account are outside it. Treat it as a backstop for genuine mistakes, not as a substitute for verifying the account before the transfer.
Can a fraudster pass every check — a real account, matching name, and a company that exists?
Yes, and this is the case that gets through. A shell company can be genuinely incorporated, hold a real bank account in its own registered name, and show as continuing on the NTS — and still exist only to receive one payment. Equally, a real company's registration can be lent to someone else, so the account name and the company match each other and neither is the party that supplied you.
What exposes it is not any single check but the combination: whether its address is shared with many other entities and when it moved there, when the director was appointed and what companies sit in his history, whether it is still filing financials, and what changed in the weeks before the payment instruction. None of the free single-purpose lookups shows that combination; it has to be assembled from registry-sourced company data and, ideally, watched for change after onboarding rather than checked once.
What is a corporate registry extract and where do I get one?
The corporate registry extract, or 법인등기부등본, is the Supreme Court registry's record of a corporation: its registered name, head office, business purposes, capital, and directors including the representative director authorised to bind the company, together with a dated history of changes. It is available to anyone through the Supreme Court Internet Registry for a nominal fee.
Read the history as well as the current state. A recent change of representative director, address or purpose is not disqualifying, but alongside a bank-detail change request it is the correlation the extract exists to reveal. Listed and audited companies additionally file with the FSS DART system, which is free.
My Korean supplier's invoice shows a different business number from the one I onboarded. Is that a problem?
Usually not. A corporation can hold a separate business registration number for each establishment — head office and branches — under a single corporate registration number. An invoice from a branch will carry the branch's business number, which differs from the head office number in your vendor master.
What should stay constant is the corporate identity: same corporate registration number, same registered corporate name. If the business number changes and the corporate identity behind it also changes, that is a different counterparty and needs re-verification from the start.
Does a successful account name match mean a Korean supplier is legitimate?
No. It is the strongest account-layer result in this series — the account exists, can receive funds, and is registered to the business whose number you supplied. That is close to a complete answer to whether the account is theirs.
It says nothing about whether the business is still open, whether it can issue you a valid tax invoice, or whether it is the real supplier behind the goods rather than a lent name. Those are the questions that decide your VAT credit in Korea, and they are answered on the company layer — the NTS status check, the corporate register, and evidence of the actual supply.
Can a foreign company use the KFTC account lookup?
Not directly from abroad. The KFTC Open Banking APIs are available to registered using-institutions in Korea, and bank name-confirmation services to that bank's business customers. A foreign buyer paying by SWIFT does not have a route to call them.
If you have a Korean subsidiary, a Korean payout partner, or a corporate banking relationship in Korea, the lookup is available to you through them. If you do not, your protection on the account side is the receiving bank's beneficiary-name matching on the inbound wire — a settlement control rather than a pre-payment lookup — and the weight shifts to the company checks, all of which are open to anyone.
