FSS Concludes Inspection of 'Bithumb Erroneous Payment Incident'... Begins Review of Sanction Level

The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) has completed its on-site inspection of Bithumb, a virtual asset exchange that mistakenly paid out Bitcoin worth approximately 60 trillion won, just one month after the incident. The FSS is expected to determine the level of sanctions after an internal review in the near future.

Bithumb Lounge located in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Photo by Yonhap News

According to financial authorities on March 11, the FSS concluded its inspection related to Bithumb's erroneous payment incident on March 6. When the incident occurred at Bithumb on February 6, the FSS immediately conducted an on-site inspection, which was upgraded to a full inspection three days later.

The FSS investigated how Bithumb paid out more Bitcoin than it actually held. In particular, the internal control system related to this process was a major focus of the inspection. Bithumb had previously reconciled its internal ledger with the actual coin wallet balance only once on the day following each transaction. It is known that the incident last month was discovered by a staff member while checking a test account for an event, and it took 20 minutes to recognize the issue.

Based on this inspection, the FSS plans to conduct a legal review and other internal assessments before deciding on the level of sanctions.

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