After series of leaks of personal information from financial institutions and phone companies, many Koreans are worried that fraudsters have their account numbers and resident registration numbers.

In response, the government is expanding an online service for people to check if their information has been stolen and used by someone else.

The Korea Internet Security Agency (KISA), an agency under the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, has been offering the service to check resident registration numbers on its Clean Center Website. Yesterday, KISA unveiled a plan to expand the service to check cell phone, credit card and bank account numbers. 

Oh Yong-seok, head of the personal information protection team of KISA, said the expansion of the service will begin next year. 

The agency saw that use of the Clean Center Website exploded after the public got nervous about the information leaks earlier this year. 

The Website started offering the service in 2009 in an effort to raise public awareness about the importance of the security of personal information. Before the leaks were publicized, people usually didn’t concern themselves with how they shared their personal data, not recognizing the threat of criminals getting hold of the information. 

The 13-digit resident registration number has been considered one of the most crucial piece of information in various identification procedures required in daily life in Korea, from signing up for a website to banking services and online-shopping. 

Oh said the number of cases of people’s registration numbers being stolen when they signed up for various websites stood at about 800,000 in first two months of this year.

The Science Ministry is also reviewing measures to expand the monitoring of illegal trading of personal information in the private sector, especially on Web portals like Naver and Daum. 

Currently, KISA is the only authority that has the ability to searches for such illegal information trading and it can request web portals to eliminate posts by the traders and report cases to prosecutors. 

BY sohn hae-yong, kim ji-yoon [jiyoon.kim@joongang.co.kr]