I wrote about this back during closure, but it's worth repeating here.
In the week after closure was announced, I realized that the store made the perfect place to launder money.
Here is how it would work. Make 10,000 free accounts. Each account uses untraceable cash gift cards that can be bought in bulk to buy Paragon Points.
Then cancel the accounts.
The money is still there. But there is no record of who the points (which will never be redeemed, obviously) belong to. There isn't even a record of which game should be getting the credit for the purchase, since (I believe) all the NCSoft "stores" shared the same money-processing service.
Now NCSoft has $X of clean money that will never be redeemed for anything. They then use this to "purchase" things like goods that will never be delivered, or "construction" that will never be performed, from the source that bought the points with all those canceled accounts.
Viola, that source now has nicely laundered money.
Did this actually happen? There is no way to tell, but I did point this out to the Korean gaming reporter who interviewed me, and he said this is something that the Korean government knows is going on in the game industry. Not guesses. Knows.
It's also a fact that the offices of both Paragon and NCSoft West were packed up and moved to a completely unknown location as soon as it was legally possible for them to do so.
And I'll just leave this here for you all to ponder.