Requested a 90,000 Won Refund but '9.7 Billion' Appeared in Account... "Disappeared After Selling Real Estate in Australia"

Australian currency, the Australian Dollar. The photo is not related to any specific expression in the article. [Image source=Pixabay]

[Asia Economy Reporter Hwang Sumi] It was recently revealed that a cryptocurrency exchange mistakenly transferred nearly 10 billion KRW to a customer's account.

Recently, Bloomberg cited Australian media Channel 7, reporting that the cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com mistakenly sent money to a customer, Mr. A, in Melbourne, Australia.

According to the report, the incident occurred last May during the process of handling a refund request submitted by Mr. A. At that time, Crypto.com mistakenly transferred 10.5 million AUD (approximately 9.748 billion KRW) to Mr. A, who had requested a refund of 100 AUD (about 93,000 KRW). This error was caused by incorrectly entering the customer's account number in the amount field during the refund process.

Mr. A did not inform Crypto.com of this mistake. It was only after seven months that Crypto.com discovered the incident through an accounting audit. During that time, Mr. A reportedly used some of the money to purchase real estate worth 1.35 million AUD (about 1.25 billion KRW) on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Accordingly, the local court ruled that Mr. A must return all the mistakenly transferred funds to Crypto.com, including the sale of the real estate. However, foreign media reported that Mr. A disappeared without appearing in court.

Meanwhile, as non-face-to-face transactions increase domestically, cases of mistakenly transferring money have also risen. In response, the Korea Deposit Insurance Corporation introduced the 'Mistaken Remittance Return Support System' last year to return wrongly transferred amounts to their original owners.

Although mistaken remittances are the responsibility of the party who made the error, the increase in non-face-to-face transactions has led to continuous related incidents, highlighting the need for government intervention. The Korea Deposit Insurance Corporation announced last July that within one year of the system's introduction, 3,218 people returned mistaken remittance amounts totaling 4 billion KRW.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.