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.
Korean Courts Apply Unjust Enrichment Rules to Crypto
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.
A 40-minute error took six months to reach a first courtroom decision
- Feb 6, 2026 · 19:00 KST: Bithumb credits 620,000 BTC to 695 users in a promotional event after staff enter “BTC” instead of “KRW” for the reward amount.
- Feb 6, 2026 · 19:20 KST: Bithumb detects the error, 20 minutes after distribution.
- Feb 6, 2026 · 19:35-19:40 KST: Trading and withdrawals frozen on affected accounts. 618,212 BTC (99.7%) recovered same night; 1,788 BTC had already been sold.
- Feb 11, 2026: CEO Lee Jae-won apologizes at a National Assembly hearing and discloses two earlier, smaller mispayment incidents.
- Apr 9, 2026: Bithumb moves to legally recover Bitcoin from users who sold their mistaken payout and refused to return the proceeds. Four separate unjust-enrichment suits eventually filed, seeking roughly ₩729 million combined.
- May 1, 2026: A court stays Bithumb’s six-month business suspension over the incident while its administrative appeal proceeds.
- Aug 27, 2026 · Decided: Seoul Central District Court rules for Bithumb in the first of the four suits, ordering four users to return proceeds from a ₩194 million case.
Bithumb’s Bitcoin Error and the Remaining Lawsuits
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 Stage | Details | Amount | Share of Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total credited by mistake | Feb 6, 2026, single event | 620,000 BTC | 100% |
| Recovered same night | Accounts frozen within 40 minutes | 618,212 BTC | 99.7% of total |
| Sold before the freeze | Covered from Bithumb’s own reserves; sellers refunded at 110% of loss | 1,788 BTC | 0.29% of total |
| Still unreturned by holdout sellers | As of April 2026; now the subject of Bithumb’s four lawsuits | ≈7 BTC | ≈₩729M sought in court |
What 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.
Bithumb 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.
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