Chapter 157. Goseong Vacation
[mon.hd.@kkktb.net. << This is the email address of the reporter who wrote the promotional article for Kim Serin's movie.]
[Change it to an embarrassing photo from Kim Serin's stage greeting. Go.]
Anna had been doing very well lately, but there was no ignoring the firepower of 〈The Stranger〉.
You could tell just from how everyone kept focusing their attacks on Serin.
These people were apparently skilled at threatening reporters into taking down articles too.
They had even harassed Kim Hye-jin, a power blogger who specialized in Youngchae.
So how much worse must it have been for actual reporters?
Even the photo they claimed showed Serin's underwear didn't show underwear at all.
She was wearing black shorts underneath.
Do you people wear shorts as underwear?
Unfortunately, the internet had a tendency to accept absurd claims as truth if enough people screamed loudly enough.
These guys were dangerous.
But seriously, what exactly was this bastard doing in such an active chat room?
I scrolled upward and checked his history.
Whenever someone posted a photo of Youngchae, he consistently replied with nothing but:
[Pretty Youngchae♥]
Apparently, he was the designated Pretty Youngchae Bot among Youngchae's akgaes.
I'd assumed they wouldn't like being called akgaes.
Apparently, I was wrong.
They actually referred to ordinary, normal fans as akgaes instead.
They were so convinced of their own righteousness that they believed they were correcting Blue Moon's corrupt fandom culture.
Their entire thought process operated differently from normal people's.
"I just got a call. They caught him and handed him over to the police."
"Really... Thank you so much."
Kim Hye-jin tilted her head and asked,
"But how did you know to come here?"
"Know what?"
"That I was going to sell the album to Jang Dae-chang here today."
Right.
His name was Jang Dae-chang.
But how had I known?
I'd originally planned to say that I'd seen her listing on Carrot Country and come to buy it.
But she'd only sold it because she couldn't withstand his private messages and stalking.
So I couldn't use that excuse.
"Your video suddenly disappeared, so I thought you might be getting threatened over copyright. I came to check on you."
"Ah..."
Kim Hye-jin thanked me again, saying she could finally relax now that Jang Dae-chang had been taken to the police station.
If I stayed any longer, she'd probably keep bowing until her back broke.
So I quickly returned to the car and sat down.
I wasn't sure what I'd gained from this incident.
Still, at least the biggest danger had been eliminated.
Maybe simply learning that this organized akgae group existed was already a major achievement.
Then Dae-hun called me.
"Where are you?"
"In the driver's seat of the Volkswagon. What's up?"
"What a nice place to be."
Dae-hun said he'd spent the entire morning investigating counterfeit merchandise.
"Back when 〈Introduction to Unrequited Love〉 got popular in China, I briefly contacted some Chinese imitation-product dealers after we received a complaint. I warned them once and left it at that. So I called them again in case they were up to something."
So while I was filming an action movie with Kim Min-jun in Beijing, Dae-hun had been handling that too.
Anyway, he'd contacted them.
From what he could tell, they were still producing small amounts of imitation goods.
"We've never really cared what they did over there, right? It only becomes a problem when the goods enter Korea. So I asked if they knew anything about people moving products toward Korea. They said there have been some suspicious people recently."
"Who?"
"Those people... No. Let me call them 'idiots' first, with all the contempt I can possibly put into the word. Those idiots used to handle shipping routes for luxury-brand counterfeits into Korea. Then one day, they got unlucky and were caught. Some time passed, and recently a new factory making idol goods opened somewhere in China. Someone happened to see those idiots going in and out of it."
How do you happen to see people going in and out of a counterfeit-goods factory?
They obviously went there because they wanted to sell imitations too and happened to run into them.
That was all the information Dae-hun had managed to get.
It wasn't complete.
But it was enough.
Those guys had been operating as smuggling specialists since the luxury-counterfeit days.
How had they bypassed coastal security?
The fishermen in the video were Korean.
They had probably paid Korean fishermen to help them.
Chinese fishing boats illegally entered Korean waters all the time.
They could have simply come in as a group and transferred the goods onto a Korean fishing boat mixed among them.
They probably moved luxury counterfeits and even drugs that way.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be enough profit in it.
"So we're sure those idiots are making our merchandise?"
"There are a lot of idols, you know. Just saying they're making idol goods isn't enough to stand out. But apparently, they saw a ton of products with Blue Moon written on them."
Unless they were even stupider than I'd assumed, it was obvious those idiots were the ones handing illegal Blue Moon goods to Korean fishermen.
"Should we report them to the Chinese authorities? Those guys are practically on probation over there right now. If they're caught for even something minor, they'll be finished."
"No. Wait for now."
I knew Chinese police were strict.
The officers I'd seen at a Beijing hotel looked like the kind of people who would crack someone's skull with a baton just for brushing shoulders with them.
If they caught someone illegally producing foreign copyrighted goods, they might crack something worse than a skull.
But if we reported them now, they'd crawl into some rat hole.
And we'd never find them again.
"Why?"
"If we're going to pull the weeds out, let's pull out every last root. We need evidence first."
The bodyguards I'd hired accompanied Jang Dae-chang all the way to the police station.
If he got released because they decided his crime wasn't serious, he'd obviously go straight back to Kim Hye-jin.
It cost a little more money.
Safety came first.
"Hey, Dae-hun. Where did we put the albums we brought when we moved?"
"Albums? You mean the dead stock?"
Dae-hun gathered his phone and stood up.
Then he told me to follow him.
We left the office, walked down the basement hallway, and entered the room at the very end.
Folding ladders.
Toolboxes.
Canopies.
Barricade posts.
All sorts of useless things were piled randomly everywhere.
The room looked like we'd been working in this building for thirty years.
"See? This is why I said we should've thrown them away before moving. They're just luggage. Apparently, this is how people trap monkeys."
"How could we throw away Blue Moon's historic first and second albums?"
"Didn't you say the second album was your least favorite?"
Even an ugly child was still your child.
Three dusty boxes were stacked in one corner of the storage room.
I cut the cords and opened them.
Two contained the first album.
One contained the second.
Each box held eighty copies.
Meaning this was enough treasure to create 240 people with priority ticketing rights.
