For more than two years, a husband and wife in Vietnam allegedly ran a billion-visit-a-year operation serving Korean webtoons in unauthorized English translation. The network, believed to be Harimanga, Manhwaclan and Kunmanga, has gone dark, its servers seized and the pair hauled in for questioning by Korean and Vietnamese authorities.
It redacted the three high-profile target domains as “Hari***,” “Manhwa***” and “Kun***.”
These match the names of three well-known manhwa aggregators: Harimanga, Manhwaclan and Kunmanga, all of which started having access problems in late May, right when Vietnamese police seized their servers.
Initially it wasn’t clear why the sites suddenly went offline, but the authorities confirmed that this was the result of a large enforcement operation that has been in the works for a long time.
The three sites have reportedly been operated by a Vietnamese couple since January 2023, serving unauthorized English translations of Korean webtoons to readers across Asia, North America and Europe, while paying the bills with banner ads and member donations.
The sites carried around 14,700 titles, about 70 percent of them Korean, and pulled in more than 1.1 billion visits a year by SimilarWeb’s count. Industry estimates put the damage to Korea’s content business at 207.2 billion won, roughly $136 million.
Naver Webtoon, which did much of the early legwork, says a single operation ran all three portals, and it had been chasing these exact domains for years. We can independently confirm the latter, as Harimanga, Manhwaclan and Kunmanga all appear by name in a 2023 DMCA subpoena Naver sent to Cloudflare.
This time, the company mapped the network with open-source intelligence and handed the evidence to Korean officials, who passed it to Vietnamese authorities.
Vietnamese police questioned the couple on May 19 and seized the servers three days later. Prosecutors plan to charge them locally, with Korea’s copyright agency and Naver helping on the paperwork. Korea has also suggested extraditing the couple for trial and recovering their earnings, though that is a hope more than a plan.
The takedown did not arrive alone. Around the same time, Korea announced the extradition of a 37-year-old man suspected of running Newtoki, which is described as the country’s most notorious manga and webtoon pirate site.
The man reportedly left Korea in 2017 and took Japanese citizenship in 2022, which normally puts a person out of reach. Officials say it is the first time Japan has handed one of its own nationals to Korea under a treaty the two signed in 2002.
The Korean piracy crackdown coincides with a new emergency blocking power, which has been live since May 11. This enables the government to order internet providers to block pirate sites without first clearing it with a review committee. The ministry blocked 34 sites on day one.
Newtoki and its sister sites shut themselves down on April 27, just before the power took effect.
There is also a bigger backdrop in Hanoi. In May, the U.S. Trade Representative branded Vietnam a “Priority Foreign Country” over online piracy, its harshest label and the first in thirteen years, then opened a Section 301 investigation that put tariffs on the table.
Washington’s complaint is that Vietnam rarely makes piracy hurt. Even in its biggest cases, against the operators of Fmovies and BestBuyIPTV, courts handed down suspended sentences and small fines with little deterrent effect.
This Korea-driven case now tests exactly that. Police seized the servers and pulled the couple in for questioning, firmer than the usual response. Whether that will continue has yet to be seen.
For now, Harimanga, Manhwaclan and Kunmanga are unlikely to come back in their original form. That said, sites like these have a habit of returning under new names, and at the time of writing, several clones remain online.
https://claude.ai/chat/818e0d6e-a99a-45ec-8381-0e43d403e857
https://x.com/kakaoent_pcok/status/2065358465820934643
https://gemini.google.com/app/db2adf824248b950
Source: Torrent Freak