Imagine you want to send someone 400 dollars, but by mistake you send 40 billion dollars instead. It would be hard to believe, but something similar happened with South Korea's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, which is now trying to recover cryptocurrency worth over 40 billion dollars. But why did this happen? The reason is that the exchange named Bithumb accidentally sent 620,000 Bitcoins to users instead of 620,000 Korean won. According to a statement released by the company, most of the mistakenly credited Bitcoins have been recovered, but Bitcoins worth 9 million dollars could not be retrieved because users either sold them or withdrew the funds before the mistake was noticed. This happened on February 6 when an employee of the crypto exchange sent Bitcoins instead of Korean currency as reward money to the users. This was for a promotional event, and the company intended to give rewards worth 620,000 won (423 dollars) to 695 users.
Out of 695 users, 249 opened their reward boxes and claimed their prizes.
The Governor of South Korea's Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), Lee Chun-jun, called it disastrous for those users who sold the Bitcoins they received as rewards. Bitcoin prices have risen in recent days, and Lee Chun-jun stated that this incident highlights internal flaws within the company.
According to experts, those users who sold the reward Bitcoins could face criminal charges, as cryptocurrency does not have legal status under Korean criminal law. According to BitHum, 99.7 Bitcoins have been recovered so far, for which an apology was sent after reversing the internal reward distribution process. However, 86 users sold 1,788 Bitcoins. Now, the company is contacting these users one by one and asking them to return an amount equivalent to the Bitcoins to the company.