South Korean Court Orders Return of Proceeds From Bithumb's 620,000-BTC Credit Error
The Seoul Central District Court ordered a Bithumb customer to return proceeds obtained after the exchange mistakenly credited enormous amounts of Bitcoin to users during a February promotional campaign. The ruling became a legal consequence of one of the year's strangest exchange failures, in which an internal error briefly disrupted Bithumb's BTC/KRW market.
On August 27, the Seoul Central District Court ruled in favor of South Korean exchange Bithumb in one of several civil lawsuits seeking the return of money obtained from Bitcoin that had been mistakenly credited to customer accounts. The defendant in the case was ordered to return proceeds of approximately 194 million won generated after selling Bitcoin that the customer had never actually purchased or earned.
The lawsuit arose from an extraordinary February operational failure. During a promotional distribution, a Bithumb employee reportedly entered rewards using BTC rather than Korean won, causing the exchange's internal system to credit approximately 620,000 BTC to hundreds of users. The figure vastly exceeded the Bitcoin actually available to those customers and represented tens of billions of dollars at then-current prices.
Some recipients attempted to sell the mistakenly credited balances before Bithumb stopped the activity. The sudden artificial supply briefly pushed the BTC/KRW pair on Bithumb roughly 15% lower and affected customers who had nothing to do with the original error. South Korean authorities subsequently investigated the exchange's internal controls and risk management, while Bithumb filed civil suits against users who had converted mistaken credits into proceeds.
The August ruling therefore represents a distinct legal stage rather than the underlying exchange event itself. It illustrates an unusual problem created when centralized exchanges maintain internal ledger balances representing Bitcoin: a software or human accounting mistake can temporarily create enormous quantities of apparent Bitcoin inside the exchange even though no such Bitcoin exists on-chain.
The February incident has now been preserved as a separate correction lead for the earlier month's timeline. August records the court's effort to unwind one consequence of that internal accounting failure.