South Korea’s National Pension Service had to address the Heeseung (ex-ENHYPEN) mess due to fans paralyzing their services … bleak

I was planning (or delusionally hoping) that the last post on Heeseung would indeed be the last on that particular aspect of the saga, but ENHYPEN fans apparently had other plans. I briefly mentioned in that post that there were calls from the fandom on social media to harass the National Pension Service over Heeseung leaving the group due to their stake in HYBE (and BELIFT Lab by proxy), but for some reason I was hoping that maybe they didn’t actually cause chaos for them.

Wrong.

WRONG.

An NPS executive came out today and said they were overwhelmed with calls over it, and clarified they have no say in anything.

Kim Sung-joo, the NPS chief executive, said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that the agency’s international support center was temporarily paralyzed last week by a surge of calls and emails from overseas fans. The disruption affected services for foreign residents in South Korea and Koreans living abroad, leaving many callers unable to access assistance, he added.
“The NPS is a long-term investor managing retirement funds and holds stakes in companies in more than 80 countries,” Kim wrote. “However, it does not intervene in the management or personnel matters of individual firms.”
“That also applies to the formation of K-pop groups and decisions regarding their members,” he added, referring to the complaints.

The branch that their calls and e-mails got routed through was the International Pension Service Center, which supports foreign workers in South Korea and South Korean workers abroad, so I’m sure they appreciated people from around the world working together to make government red tape even worse.

If you ever had to call one of these government branches for financial issues, and have waited on hold for four hours just to get something squared away, you’d know how absurd this all must be. Apoplectic would be the word I’d use if I found out my call was fucked because of some dumbass pop fans melting down over something that was likely just an individual exercising free will.