Singer IU (EDAM Entertainment)

A 30-year-old South Korean man who pretended to sell tickets for K-pop concerts and swindled 595 million won ($450,000) from his victims has been sentenced to six years in prison, a court said Tuesday.

The Seoul Central District Court found the defendant, surnamed Kim, guilty on multiple counts of fraud. An investigation found that Kim had pretended to sell tickets for concerts of popular artists here including IU, Blackpink and Lim Young-woong, some 130 times, pocketing the profits from the sales and refusing to deliver the tickets to those who had purchased them.

Kim had also obtained loans using the credit cards of his victims, based on the information that he acquired during a scam selling fake IU concert tickets.

In addition to the concert ticket scam, Kim is also accused of conducting scams involving musical tickets, cameras, gift certificates for a local department store and video game currency.

"The defendant continued to go on scamming his victims even while he was being tried for fraud, and used the profits for gambling and making cryptocurrency investments. (The court) has decided that he should receive a punishment on par with (the severity of) his crime," the court said in its verdict.

Kim has appealed the ruling.

The South Korean music industry has been impacted by ticket scalping of popular artists, which sees fans paying a premium to see their favorite artists. The Record Label Industry Association of Korea recently conducted a survey which suggested that 32.8 percent of those aged between 19 and 29 have bought a ticket from a scalper at least once, with 20 percent of the age group saying they had spent more than 500,000 won on a ticket.

Lim Young-woong's agency recently said it canceled 118 ticket reservations for his Jan 19-21 concert, saying they were suspected to have been reserved by ticket scalpers. Lim's tickets, the priciest of which is 160,000 won, has been sold for as much as 1 million won by the scalpers.

Singer Jang Beom-june, who had been scheduled to hold 10 concerts in January and February, canceled all ticket reservations due to ticket scalping. He later posted that he will hold an online raffle for the rights to buy his tickets, limiting each person to the purchase of one ticket.