Korea’s e-Arrival Card became mandatory for nearly every foreign national entering the country on January 1, 2026. It’s free. It takes a few minutes. And Korean immigration has already had to post an official notice warning travelers that fake websites are charging for it anyway.

That’s actually the smaller of Korea’s two overlapping scam problems right now. The bigger one targets K-ETA — Korea’s real paid travel authorization, the one with an actual 10,000 KRW (about $8) government fee — where Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has warned that fraudulent sites have charged up to 20 times the official fee, and travelers have told regional outlets they paid as much as $100 for the same form. Two different Korean entry documents, two different fee structures, and scam operators working both at once.

This site has already tracked the free-form version of this exact scam through Indonesia, Thailand’s TDAC, China’s CDAC, and Vietnam. Korea’s version has an extra layer the others don’t: a K-ETA fee waiver that just got extended through the end of 2026, which is genuinely good news for a lot of travelers — except it also means some of them are skipping K-ETA and assuming that’s the end of Korean paperwork, when it isn’t.

Quick Facts — Korea e-Arrival Card & K-ETA, 2026

Detail	Info
e-Arrival Card mandatory since	January 1, 2026, for nearly all foreign nationals
e-Arrival Card cost	Free
e-Arrival Card portal	e-arrivalcard.go.kr
Submission window	Within 3 days (72 hours) of arrival
K-ETA fee (when required)	10,000 KRW (~$8)
K-ETA fee waiver	Extended through Dec. 31, 2026, for 22 nationalities
Scam charges reported	Up to $100 for K-ETA-adjacent scam sites, per traveler reports
Domain tell	Legitimate Korean government sites end in .go.kr

In one sentence: Korea’s e-Arrival Card is free and mandatory at e-arrivalcard.go.kr, K-ETA’s separate ~$8 fee is waived through 2026 for 22 nationalities, and scam sites are charging real money for both — check for .go.kr before you type in a card number, full stop.

What Is the e-Arrival Card, and Who Actually Needs It?

The e-Arrival Card is Korea’s digital replacement for the paper entry card that used to get handed out on the plane or filled in at an immigration counter. It piloted quietly starting in February 2025, then went fully mandatory on January 1, 2026, for effectively everyone entering the country — including foreign business travelers and workers, not just tourists. You submit it within three days of arrival: passport details, travel itinerary, accommodation address, a health and customs declaration. Same information the paper card asked for, just filed from your couch instead of your knees on a tray table.

Not everyone has to file it, though, and this is where the K-ETA connection actually starts to matter.

Who’s Exempt From the e-Arrival Card

Do I need to pay for Korea’s e-Arrival Card? No — it’s always free at the official portal, e-arrivalcard.go.kr. Some travelers don’t need to file it at all: valid K-ETA holders entering visa-free are exempt, along with residence card holders, permanent resident card holders, overseas Korean resident card holders, and electronic group visa holders. Everyone else — including K-ETA-exempt travelers using that exemption to enter — must submit it.

Read that exemption list again, because it’s the whole reason this post exists. A valid K-ETA gets you out of filing the e-Arrival Card. Being exempt from K-ETA does not. Those are opposite outcomes that sound almost identical if you’re skimming instead of reading closely, and skimming is exactly what most people do three days before a flight.

The K-ETA Waiver Isn’t What Half the Search Results Make It Sound Like

Korea’s Ministry of Justice extended its temporary K-ETA fee exemption through December 31, 2026, for 22 nationalities: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Macao, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK, and the US (Guam included). If you’re traveling on one of those passports, you don’t need K-ETA at all for a standard tourist trip — no application, no 10,000 KRW fee, no waiting on approval.

Here’s the part that trips people up: skipping K-ETA means you never hold a K-ETA. And the e-Arrival Card exemption belongs specifically to K-ETA holders. So travelers from those 22 waived countries — the ones who just read “your fee is waived” and assumed Korea got easier — still have to file the free e-Arrival Card, on a completely separate site, within 72 hours of landing. The waiver saves them $8. It doesn’t save them the form.

Travelers from countries outside that list are in a different, in some ways simpler position: they still need K-ETA to enter visa-free, they still pay the ~$8 fee, and if they use that K-ETA to enter, they’re exempt from the e-Arrival Card. One form, one fee, done. The waived nationalities get the cheaper path and the extra paperwork. The non-waived nationalities pay $8 and skip a form. Neither group is better off exactly — they’re just trading a dollar amount for a five-minute task, in opposite directions.

If you’re not sure which category you’re in, the K-ETA application process itself tells you — Korean authorities note that exempt travelers get a pop-up notification when they scan their passport during the K-ETA application, letting them know they don’t need to apply. Worth doing even if you expect to be waived, just to get that confirmation and then go file the e-Arrival Card instead.

The Scam Sites Working Both Angles

Korea’s own immigration authorities have confirmed the e-Arrival Card scam directly: fake websites impersonating e-arrivalcard.go.kr have been found charging fees for a service that costs nothing, and the notice tells travelers to verify the .go.kr domain and the Korean government emblem before entering anything. It doesn’t publish a specific dollar figure — Korea’s warning is more about the existence of the scam than a documented price tag, which is honestly the more common pattern across this whole category of fraud. Most governments confirm the con exists long before anyone tallies what it actually cost people.

K-ETA’s version is better documented. Because K-ETA has a real fee, scam sites don’t have to invent a charge from nothing — they just inflate one. South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has confirmed that unofficial K-ETA sites have charged up to 20 times the real fee, and Malaysian travelers told Says and Travel Weekly Asia they’d paid up to $100 through padded “service fees” and processing add-ons — for an application that costs 10,000 KRW and nothing else on the actual government site. The lookalike sites share one trait more than any specific domain: URLs close enough to the real k-eta.go.kr to pass a glance, wrong enough to matter the moment you check.

The mechanism is the one this site keeps documenting country after country: buy search ads or build SEO pages for “Korea K-ETA,” “Korea entry form,” “e-arrival card Korea,” and put a payment wall in front of something the government gives away for the price of a form or an $8 fee. Sponsored results routinely outrank the actual .go.kr sites, because government portals generally aren’t buying ad placement and scam operators are. Position on the results page tells you nothing. The domain tells you everything.

How to File the Real e-Arrival Card

1. Go directly to e-arrivalcard.go.kr. Type it yourself rather than clicking a search result. Confirm .go.kr is in the address bar before entering anything.
2. Provide your email address and accept the terms. This is where your confirmation and any updates get sent.
3. Enter your passport details — name as printed, passport number, nationality, dates.
4. Enter your travel itinerary — flight information, arrival date, and where you’re staying in Korea.
5. Review everything before submitting. No payment screen appears at any point. If one does, close the tab.

Submit within the 72-hour window before you land. Screenshot your confirmation once you’re done — don’t count on hotel or airport Wi-Fi being there when you need it.

How to Apply for K-ETA, If You Actually Need It

If you’re not on the waived list, the only legitimate K-ETA portal is k-eta.go.kr. The fee is 10,000 KRW, roughly $8, plus a small standard payment-processing charge — nothing close to $50, and nothing that requires “expedited” anything. Apply at least a few days before your flight; approval isn’t always instant, and scrambling at the gate is how people end up settling for whatever site loads first.

Korea Fits a Pattern That’s Basically the Whole Region Now

Korea joins a list this site has been building all year. Indonesia’s Arrival Card draws scam sites charging up to $204 AUD for a free form. Thailand’s TDAC reportedly reached 10% of all foreign arrivals paying fake portals, with Thai Immigration estimating $100 million in fraudulent charges. China’s Digital Arrival Card and Vietnam’s digital arrival card both drew impostor sites within weeks of launch. Same setup every time: a government digitizes a form, the official domain doesn’t out-rank paid ads for its own product’s name, and travelers filling this out for the first time have no baseline for what it should cost.

Korea’s twist — a paid form and a free form, both scammed, both easy to confuse with each other — is arguably messier than most of the region, if only because there are genuinely two right answers depending on your passport. If you’re planning around Korea’s cherry blossom season or building out something more ambitious like the Dongseo Trail coast-to-coast route, the entry paperwork is a five-minute footnote to a much bigger trip. Don’t let it be the part that costs you money it shouldn’t.

The Bottom Line

Korea’s e-Arrival Card is free, mandatory since January 1, 2026, and lives at one address: e-arrivalcard.go.kr. K-ETA is a separate, genuinely paid system — about $8 — that’s waived through December 31, 2026, for travelers from 22 countries, but that waiver trades a fee for a form, not the other way around. Scam sites are working both systems, and reported charges for the fraudulent K-ETA versions have run as high as $100 — up to 20 times the real fee, per Korea’s own Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Check the domain before you pay anyone anything. Government Korean sites end in .go.kr. If a site charging you for entry paperwork doesn’t, you’re not on it, no matter what the page says.

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Official e-Arrival Card portal: e-arrivalcard.go.kr. Official K-ETA portal: k-eta.go.kr. Korean immigration fraud notice: immigration.go.kr. Korea MOFA notice on unofficial K-ETA websites: overseas.mofa.go.kr. Traveler-reported K-ETA scam charges: Says, Travel Weekly Asia. K-ETA fee exemption extension through 2026: EY tax alert. Information current as of September 2026 — verify current requirements with Korean immigration before travel.