South Korean police moved Tuesday to secure a detention warrant for Bang Si-hyuk, deepening a fraud and unfair trading case that has shadowed the founder of Hybe for months. Investigators booked Bang on charges tied to South Korea’s Capital Markets Act and allege he made roughly 190 billion won in illicit gains during Hybe’s 2020 initial public offering.
Police say Bang misled early Hybe shareholders into selling their stakes to a private equity fund linked to his associates, then received about 30 percent of the fund’s profits under a prior agreement after the company went public. Bang has previously denied wrongdoing. Hybe shares fell as much as 2.9 percent after news of the warrant request.
The push for detention marks the sharpest turn yet in a case that began when financial authorities opened an examination in December 2024 over undisclosed profit-sharing agreements ahead of Hybe’s IPO. Police raided Hybe’s Seoul headquarters in July 2025, and Bang voluntarily returned to South Korea the following month to cooperate. In December, the Seoul Southern District Court approved a provisional seizure of his Hybe shares worth 156.8 billion won, about $118 million.
The allegations land with particular force because Bang built the company from the ground up. He founded Big Hit Entertainment in 2005 after splitting from JYP Entertainment, and the business came close to bankruptcy in 2007 before he reoriented it around BTS in the following decade. BTS debuted in 2013 and later became the first Korean group to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, turning the company that became Hybe into a global entertainment heavyweight.
That history is part of what makes the case so combustible now. Bang has been barred from leaving South Korea since August of last year as the probe advanced, and Hybe has not yet released a public response to Tuesday’s developments. The question now is not whether the investigation has traction; it is whether prosecutors can turn a long-running accounting fight into a criminal case that keeps one of K-pop’s most powerful figures in court.
Bang Si-hyuk, 53, remains at the center of a dispute over the Hybe IPO that could now move from financial scrutiny to detention. If police persuade a court to hold him, the next phase will test both the strength of the evidence and the company’s ability to keep moving while its founder fights allegations over how he profited from the market debut that made him famous.