대규모 사기범죄 처벌 합리화를 위한 형사법적 고찰 ― 미국과 영국의 입법례를 중심으로 ―

Large-scale fraud crimes targeting numerous ordinary citizens, such as rental deposit scams and voice phishing, have emerged as a serious social issue in South Korea. However, the current criminal justice system is criticized for failing to impose punishments commensurate with the gravity of these offenses. A key limitation lies in the Supreme Court's precedent of treating fraud against multiple victims as separate concurrent offenses (substantive concurrent crimes) rather than as a single comprehensive offense. This interpretation prevents the aggregation of damages from each victim. Consequently, the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Economic Crimes, which mandates severe penalties for high-value fraud, cannot be applied even when the total damage is immense, leading to a structural problem where sentences are perceived as lenient and disconnected from public sentiment. This study analyzes the limitations of the current punishment framework and seeks rational improvement measures through a comparative legal analysis of the systems in the United States and the United Kingdom. The U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines provide a model for systematically reflecting the total harm of a crime in sentencing by precisely quantifying the loss amount and the number of victims. The U.K. Sentencing Guidelines offer a sophisticated framework that pursues both proportionality and individualization by dually evaluating the objective harm of the crime and the subjective culpability of the offender. Based on these comparative insights, this paper proposes a multi-layered set of improvement measures. First, to bridge the punishment gap while bypassing jurisprudential debates on the counting of crimes, a special provision for concurrent offenses should be legislated within the Specific Economic Crimes Act, allowing for the aggregation of damages for sentencing purposes in multi-victim fraud cases. Second, at the judicial policy level, the Sentencing Guidelines should be reformed to include more granular tiers for loss amounts and to explicitly incorporate the number of victims, the organized nature of the crime, and victim vulnerability as key aggravating factors. Lastly, to fundamentally deter such crimes, criminal proceeds recovery must be strengthened by introducing an independent forfeiture system that allows for the confiscation of illicit assets without a criminal conviction and by more actively imposing concurrent fines proportional to the illegal gains.