TL;DR:
The South Korean exchange Bithumb escalated its legal battle with a group of users who refused to return funds credited by mistake. The platform requested a local court to preventively seize bitcoins valued at approximately $8 million. The measure is a preliminary step before a civil lawsuit and blocks the debtors from moving the assets while the judicial process moves forward.
The origin of the problem dates back to February 6, when the exchange organized a promotion intended to pay 620,000 won —around $460— to 249 winners. An employee mistakenly entered “BTC” instead of “KRW” in the system, resulting in each winner seeing 620,000 BTC credited to their internal accounts, a figure that, on paper, represented more than $40 billion in assets.
Within minutes, some users took advantage of the situation and sold approximately 1,788 BTC before Bithumb could freeze the accounts involved. The massive sales pushed the price of the BTC/KRW pair down to the range of 80 million won, equivalent to around $54,000 per unit. The exchange acted swiftly to reverse the credits and recover most of the sold coins, but around 12.3 billion won —roughly $8.3 million— remained unreturned after the first few days.
After weeks of direct negotiations with the users involved, that balance was reduced to the current seven bitcoin. Legal experts consulted by local media noted that these cases fall under the concept of unjust enrichment in South Korean legislation, which obliges recipients to return assets received without cause. If the coins have already been sold, users could be forced to repurchase them at the current market price to settle the debt.
The incident was triggered by a single human error, amplified by the speed and irreversibility of crypto transactions, ultimately leading to a multimillion-dollar crisis. Bithumb is the second-largest exchange in South Korea according to CoinGecko, with a daily trading volume of $388 million.
