Bithumb Wins Two Lawsuits Over Its 40 Billion Dollar Bitcoin Crediting Error
On the evening of February 6, 2026, an employee at South Korea’s Bithumb exchange sat down to process a routine promotional payout. The “random box” giveaway was supposed to hand out somewhere between 2,000 and 50,000 Korean won apiece — pocket change, really — to 249 winners, for a total payout of roughly 620,000 won, or about $420. Somewhere in the input screen, the unit field got set to Bitcoin instead of Korean won. Every winning account was credited not with a few thousand won, but with 620,000 BTC each — a keystroke-level accounting error that, at the bitcoin price prevailing that night, briefly conjured more than $40 billion in phantom cryptocurrency into hundreds of ordinary user wallets.
Bithumb caught the error and moved to freeze the affected accounts, eventually clawing back 618,212 of the 620,000 BTC — a recovery rate of 99.7%. But 1,788 BTC worth of the mistakenly credited balance had already been sold by users before the freeze took effect, converted into cash sitting in ordinary bank accounts rather than crypto wallets Bithumb could simply reverse. Getting that money back meant going to court. In March, Bithumb filed four separate civil suits seeking unjust enrichment judgments against users who had liquidated their windfall and kept the proceeds.
This week, the Seoul Central District Court handed Bithumb its first two wins. On Wednesday, the court’s 90th Civil Division ordered a defendant to return 5 million won (about $3,600). On Thursday, presiding judge Kim Yu-seong ruled against a second defendant in a larger claim worth 194 million won (roughly $140,500), finding that cash proceeds from selling the erroneously credited bitcoin constituted unjust enrichment under Korean law — legal language for money someone received without any right to keep it, regardless of whose mistake put it there. Two further suits remain pending, covering claims of about 14.8 million won ($10,700) and 500 million won ($362,000).
The rulings matter beyond their modest dollar figures because they establish the legal principle Bithumb needs for its two still-open cases and for any future disputes over the small remainder of unrecovered bitcoin. Courts sympathetic to the argument that a system glitch doesn’t transfer legal ownership give exchanges a much stronger hand when trying to reverse the fallout of an internal error — a scenario that, given how often “add zeros in the wrong currency field” shows up as a root cause across the industry, is unlikely to be the last of its kind.
For Bithumb, the wins close out a chapter that could have been catastrophic reputational damage rather than an embarrassing but contained accounting mistake. For the defendants, it’s a reminder that money that shows up in an account by obvious error tends to come with a legal string attached, however long it takes the courts to pull it.
Want a clearer picture of how exchanges custody and account for user balances in the first place? Coin680’s Bitcoin Academy has beginner-friendly explainers on exchange mechanics.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency exchange balances and legal outcomes vary by jurisdiction — always do your own research before making investment or legal decisions.