Jeju Island has long occupied a special place in the South Korean imagination. Known for its volcanic craters, dramatic coastal cliffs, emerald-green waters, and gentle orange groves, it has become a beloved honeymoon spot, a family vacation destination, and a backdrop for countless television dramas. Every year, millions of travelers fly or sail there, expecting nothing more than seaside cafes, scenic hikes, and the slow, peaceful rhythm of island life. That is why the events of this past summer felt so jarring and unsettling. Within the span of a few days in August, police discovered the bodies of four people who had been reported missing on the island. For the families of these individuals, the news was devastating. But what made the situation even more painful was the growing suspicion that authorities had not taken these disappearances seriously enough. One case in particular captured the public’s grief and outrage. Jang Mi-ran, a 37-year-old woman, had been missing for some time, and her family had begged police for help, making emotional appeals in public and through the media. Only after their desperate pleas did an investigation begin. When her body was finally recovered, authorities said they could not determine the cause of death because of how badly her remains had decomposed. Then came the truly shocking revelation: a police officer, identified only by his surname Bu, was arrested and accused of closing her case as a “traffic accident” even though her body had not been found. He allegedly told her family that he had been in contact with her and that she did not want to be found—an apparent attempt to avoid the extra work of a real investigation. In the same period, the search also uncovered the body of a man in his sixties whose case had reportedly been falsely closed by the same officer. The pain of losing a loved one is unbearable on its own. Learning that officials may have deliberately concealed the truth is a different kind of wound entirely.
In the wake of these tragedies, social media became a battlefield of speculation, grief, and fear. Among the most widely shared messages was a map of Jeju Island annotated with what appeared to be details of thirteen supposed missing-person cases dating back to 2019. A Korean-language post on X, shared on August 25, asked a question that immediately resonated with nervous readers: “Missing person cases keep happening on Jeju island, which is only thought of as a tourism hotspot… Why do people keep disappearing on Jeju island?” The poster claimed the map had been assembled from media reports illustration by illustration, and the same visual was later shared on Threads, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. The message went further, advising people to avoid visiting Jeju altogether. It warned that “Chinese criminals can come to Korea (Jeju) visa-free” and that there was also a high risk of crimes being committed by South Korean criminals on the island. The implication was clear: Jeju was no longer a safe haven but a place where people vanish, where criminals roam freely, and where even the police cannot be trusted. In an anxious moment, with real bodies being recovered and an officer under arrest, the map felt disturbingly plausible. It gave people a simple, scary narrative to explain a complex and painful situation. And because it looked like a careful, evidence-based compilation—dates, locations, categories of disappearances—it spread quickly from account to account, crossing social media platforms and language barriers. The emotional pull was undeniable. Who would want to take their family to an island where people keep disappearing? The post did not just raise questions; it planted suspicion in the minds of thousands, perhaps millions, of potential travelers and online observers.
But when the claims were examined closely, the map began to fall apart. Of the thirteen cases it listed, four were indeed the missing people whose bodies had been found in August—the cases that had triggered the public outcry in the first place. That part was real; the tragedy was real; the mishandling by the police was real. The remaining nine cases, however, did not exist in any official record. Six of these purported disappearances allegedly involved tourists who went missing while swimming, snorkeling, scuba diving, or fishing in or near the sea. Two more were said to have disappeared near the shore, and one allegedly involved a sailor who went missing from a fishing boat while working at sea. These were specific claims, but exhaustive keyword searches based on the dates, locations, and descriptions provided in the map produced no trace of them on any major South Korean news outlet. Searches that expanded to include the months surrounding the stated dates also came up empty. AFP, the international news agency that fact-checked the posts, contacted the Jeju provincial police and the Jeju regional coast guard directly. On September 16 and 17, both agencies responded that the nine alleged cases shown in the circulating map did not match their official records. Not a single one. This is a powerful reminder that in the age of social media, a polished graphic can look like evidence while being nothing more than a collage of rumors, half-truths, and fabricated details. The map may have been created with a kernel of genuine concern, or it may have been designed intentionally to stoke fear. Either way, it did real damage by distorting the public’s understanding of what was happening on the island)Skip to content
. The spread of the map demonstrates how quickly misinformation can flourish during a moment of institutional failure, especially when people are already feeling betrayed and frightened. The truth was bad enough—police mishandling cases, an officer arrested, families left to campaign for justice on their own—but the false map transformed a serious public crisis into something even more sinister and imaginary.
To make sense of whether Jeju truly has an unusual missing-person problem, it helps to look at the broader data. South Korea is not a country where people vanish without a trace in great numbers. Every year, more than 700,000 adults are reported missing nationwide. That number sounds enormous, but police data shows that the overwhelming majority of these cases are resolved quickly: about 95 percent of missing adults are found within days, and 99 percent are located within a month. In 2024, Jeju recorded more than 800 missing-person cases among adults. That is by no means a small number, but it must be compared to the island’s population. When the number of missing people is calculated against every 100,000 residents, Jeju’s rate comes out to about 120.5 cases—which is actually below the national average of approximately 140. The capital, Seoul, had the highest rate of missing-person reports at roughly 239 per 100,000 residents, followed by the southern port city of Busan at around 154. This does not mean Jeju is free of problems. Every missing-person case is a family’s nightmare, and the August discoveries show that systemic failures can have tragic consequences. But the data makes clear that Jeju is not an island where people are disappearing at a uniquely alarming rate. The false map fed on anxiety rather than evidence. It suggested that the island had become a black hole, when official statistics tell a more complicated and less sensational story. If anything, the real scandal is not a mysterious epidemic of disappearances but the conduct of certain officers who failed to do their dutycccc. The public’s anger, in that sense, is completely justified—they were let down by the very institution entrusted with protecting their loved ones. But using that justified anger as fuel for invented statistics and fabricated cases only deepens the damage, creating a climate of fear that punishes an entire community for the failures of a few.
Crime data, like missing-person data, also paints a misleading picture of Jeju when viewed superficially. If you look only at the number of crimes per 100,000 residents, Jeju has the highest rate in the country. That sounds alarming, and on the surface it seems to support the narrative that the island is becoming a crime hotspot. But as criminologists are quick to point out, crime rates are supposed to measure the likelihood that a person will become a victim of crime. And in Jeju, the population that is actually present on the island at any given time is far larger than the official resident count. Jeju’s permanent population is the smallest among the nine provinces in South Korea, with around 675,000 residents. But the island welcomes a staggering 14 million visitors every year. Tourists, day-trippers, seasonal workers, and other temporary guests vastly increase the number of people on the ground. Yet these visitors are not counted in the denominator of the crime rate. That omission leads to a serious distortion, because the number of crimes is driven in part by the sheer volume of people passing through, while the official population—the number used to calculate the rate—remains artificially low. Kyonggi University criminology professor Jung Yeon-dae explained this problem clearly, saying that the “disproportionately high number of external visitors” is not included in official crime data, and this can “overblow” the actual risk of crime on the island. He warned that without accounting for this, the crime rate in Jeju risks “exaggerating and misjudging the actual danger of crimes on the island.” Local authorities do maintain an unofficial “living population” figure, which combines residents with visitors, and that estimate suggests visitors could account for about a fifth of the total number of people on the island in a given period. When using the living population figure for 2025—averaging roughly 860,000 people per month—the crime rate falls by nearly 20 percent, to about 3,500 cases per 100,000 people. That is still above the national average, so Jeju is not without its challenges, but it is no longer the country’s highest. The island’s real crime rate, in other words, is not as extraordinary as raw statistics first suggest. It is the failure to include visitors—what some might call a statistical oversight—that makes Jeju look like an outlier. Numbers, when taken out of context, can be just as misleading as fabricated maps.
Ultimately, the saga of Jeju’s missing-person claims is a story about the dangerous intersection of real institutional failure and viral misinformation. The anger that followed the discovery of the four bodies was entirely legitimate. Families had been ignored, evidence had been mishandled, and one officer had allegedly manufactured an explanation to avoid doing his job. When official systems fail, people naturally turn to one another, to social media, to alternative sources of information. They search for patterns, for names, for a way to make sense of a world that suddenly feels unsafe. But in that search, it is all too easy to stumble upon content that looks informative but is actually misleading. The map of thirteen missing persons was a perfect example of this phenomenon: it mixed real cases with fabricated ones, attached plausible details to unverified claims, and presented the entire package as a comprehensive record of danger. In doing so, it exploited people’s fear and grief, turning a tragic but localized scandal into a broader narrative of an island overrun by criminals and mysterious disappearances. The consequences of this misinformation are not abstract. They affect the livelihoods of residents who depend on tourism. They shape the decisions of travelers who may avoid the island based on false impressions. And they distract from the real, necessary conversation about how to improve policing and accountability in South Korea. Jeju does not need to be protected from imaginary criminals; it needs its institutions to work better, to respond to families with compassion and diligence, and to ensure that no more cases are quietly closed without ground. The lesson of this entire episode is not that Jeju is a terrifying place beyond the reach of law and order. It is that both real institutions and digital platforms have a responsibility to be truthful—and that the public deserves better than either official negligence or viral fiction. The island will recover its reputation as a place of beauty and tranquility, but trust, once broken, takes much longer to rebuild. That rebuilding can only begin when the facts are clear, the wrongdoers are held accountable, and the noise of false stories fades into the background. Until then, the best answer to the question “Why do people keep disappearing on Jeju?” is simple: they do not, in any unusual numbers. But real people did lose their lives, and real families are still looking for answers. They deserve our attention; the fabricated map deserves our skepticism.