Police have caught a group of manufacturers of illegal breast implants which were filled with industrial silicone, normally used as a raw material for paint.

The implants were sold below market price to more than 100 hospitals nationwide including some in Cheongdam-dong, a Gangnam district famous for plastic surgery in Korea, the Gyeonggi Provincial Police Agency said on Tuesday. There are some patients suffering from skin inflammation and bedsores since getting the implants, officers said.

The police arrested a 43-year-old man identified only by his surname Shin and two others for violating a law on medical appliances. Shin and his collaborators had been producing illegal implants at a factory in Siheung, Gyeonggi Province, since 2002, with cheap industrial silicon they imported from China. The three sold the defective implants to hospitals around the county by utilizing sales networks they built when they worked as sales managers for medical equipment companies years before. Some other products such as fillers for noses and Botox treatments were disguised as products approved by the Korea Food and Drug Agency.

Although the products did not undergo safety tests, hospitals bought them because they were substantially cheaper ― about one-third of the market price, officials said. Hospitals also charged half price to patients who had surgeries with the fake implants.

Investigators said the patient victims were mostly women in their 30s and 40s. Some of them were found to have suffered from their skin tissue dying and implant hardening. The police plan to expand the investigation into whether hospitals performed surgeries knowing that they were not medically approved.

By Cho Chung-un (christory@heraldcorp.com)