A Seoul court sided with Bithumb on Thursday, ordering four users who sold Bitcoin the exchange had mistakenly paid them to hand back the proceeds. The Seoul Central District Court’s Civil Di
A Seoul court sided with Bithumb on Thursday, ordering four users who sold Bitcoin the exchange had mistakenly paid them to hand back the proceeds.
The Seoul Central District Court’s Civil Division 90 found the case amounted to unjust enrichment. It’s the first ruling among four related lawsuits, and the case decided Thursday sought about ₩194 million.
The outcome itself wasn’t really in doubt. Korean courts had already applied the same reasoning earlier this year, in a separate case involving a mistaken USDT transfer at Bybit, a rival exchange. A Seoul court ruled then that crypto counts as property under Korean law, and that unjust enrichment applies to it the same way it would to cash.
Thursday’s ruling follows that same logic, so it isn’t a surprise on its own. What it actually tests is whether that reasoning holds once the numbers get bigger and the facts get messier.
The case just decided was the smallest of Bithumb’s four suits. The one that will say more, at roughly ₩500 million, is still pending.
The dispute traces back to Feb. 6, when a Bithumb staff member entered “BTC” instead of “KRW” while setting a reward amount for a promotional event. The mistake credited 620,000 Bitcoin, worth roughly ₩62 trillion at the time, to 695 accounts.
Bithumb caught the error within 20 minutes and froze the affected accounts inside 40, recovering 99.7% of the coins that same night.
Recovery StageDetailsAmountShare of TotalTotal credited by mistakeFeb 6, 2026, single event620,000 BTC100%Recovered same nightAccounts frozen within 40 minutes618,212 BTC99.7% of totalSold before the freezeCovered from Bithumb’s own reserves; sellers refunded at 110% of loss1,788 BTC0.29% of totalStill unreturned by holdout sellersAs of April 2026; now the subject of Bithumb’s four lawsuits≈7 BTC≈₩729M sought in courtWhat the freeze couldn’t recover was the 1,788 BTC some users had already sold. Bithumb covered that shortfall from its own reserves and refunded affected sellers at 110% of their losses. Most of that money came back voluntarily. What didn’t, an estimated 7 BTC as of April, is what the four lawsuits are now fighting over. Three of those suits remain open.
Case Status: Four Lawsuits, One Bithumb WinBithumb has more riding on this than the lawsuits. South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service is still weighing separate sanctions tied to the same error.
That’s on top of an existing ₩36.8 billion fine and six-month suspension from the Financial Intelligence Unit, which a court has temporarily stayed while Bithumb appeals. That case gets its first hearing in October. The exchange has booked about ₩39.5 billion in litigation reserves against the combined fallout. Bithumb’s next real test comes when a judge rules on the largest of the four cases.
Bithumb was fined 210 million won after Korea’s privacy regulator found it shared users’ personal data overseas without proper consent.
