On August 27, the Seoul Central District Court ordered a user who sold an incorrectly displayed balance during Bithumb's mistaken bitcoin credit incident to return approximately 194 million won in sale proceeds. On the 26th, a ruling in a case of the same type had ordered the return of approximately 4.99 million won, bringing the combined amount recognized for return in the two cases to approximately 199 million won. Both cases proceeded by service by public notice. Service by public notice is a procedure in which litigation documents are deemed to have been delivered through means such as court posting when the counterparty's address or place of work is difficult to confirm. Bithumb has filed four suits for the return of unjust enrichment in connection with the same incident, and the remaining two cases, involving approximately 500 million won and 14.8 million won, are ongoing. The incident occurred in February when, while paying out rewards for a customer event, a won-denominated amount was entered incorrectly in bitcoin units, causing approximately 620,000 bitcoin to appear in user accounts. This was an error in the exchange's internal ledger, which records each customer's entitlements, and no actual transfer took place on the Bitcoin network. Bithumb restricted trading and withdrawals and recovered most of the amount, but some users sold the bitcoin before that, and it filed four suits against users who did not return the sale proceeds. The court's specific reasoning, the defendants' arguments, whether an appeal will be filed, and whether the rulings have become final could not be confirmed in publicly available materials. These rulings are first-instance decisions recognizing an obligation to return proceeds on the part of users who disposed of balances displayed in error, and they are not legal principles settled through contested arguments from both sides.
Bithumb Wins Two of Four First-Instance Suits Seeking Return of Proceeds From Mistakenly Credited Bitcoin: Roughly 199 Million Won Recognized for Return
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Numbers displayed on a centralized exchange's screen are not the same as holding records finalized by blockchain transactions. That said, these two cases are first-instance rulings issued without the defendants' arguments being presented at trial, so the extent of the responsibility borne by users who dispose of mistakenly credited balances remains an open question. A domestic framework for handling mistaken credit incidents would need to set out, together, the exchange's standards for recovery and trade cancellation, protection for counterparties to executed trades, and procedures for user notification and objection.