Gmarket CEO: "Suspected Identity Theft Cases Unrelated to Hacking"

"No Evidence of External Intrusion"
Full Refund for All Affected Customers

Gmarket announced on December 4 that the unauthorized payment incident that occurred on November 29 was not a hacking incident.

James Jang (Seunghwan Jang), CEO of Gmarket (pictured), delivered a message to employees on the same day, stating, "There have been reports of customer damage suspected to be due to identity theft on our site," and emphasized, "This incident was not related to hacking, and there was no evidence of external intrusion at all."

James Jang (Seunghwan Jang), CEO of Gmarket, is speaking at the Media Day held at COEX in Gangnam-gu, Seoul on the 21st. Photo by Jaehyun Park

Regarding the cause of the incident, he explained, "The method involved logging in and making payments using personal information illegally collected from outside sources," and added, "We suspect this is a typical case of identity theft, exploiting the practice of using the same account credentials across multiple sites."

He continued, "Immediately after recognizing the incident, around 8 p.m. on November 29, we blocked the related IP addresses, and by around 11 p.m., we had strengthened our payment-related security policies. As a result, there have been no additional damages since then."

Previously, on November 29, unauthorized payment incidents affected around 60 Gmarket users. The amount of damage per individual was reported to be less than 200,000 won. On the same day, Coupang announced that information from 33.7 million member accounts had been leaked.

Jang stated, "Given that this incident coincided with the timing of a recent suspected hacking incident at another company, we considered it a serious matter and reported it to the Financial Supervisory Service," and added, "We will use this case as an opportunity to further strengthen our company-wide security awareness and lead the way in creating a safer environment for personal information management."

Meanwhile, Gmarket announced the previous day that it would provide full refunds to all affected customers. The company also stated that it plans to cooperate with investigative authorities to determine the cause and conduct further investigations.

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