$44B bitcoin blunder puts South Korea regulators on alert

South Korea’s top financial watchdog is increasing oversight of crypto markets days after a local exchange mistakenly distributed billions of dollars in bitcoin to users. The Financial Supervisory Service will launch planned investigations into “high-risk” practices that undermine market order, including large-scale price manipulation by so-called whales, trading schemes tied to suspended deposits and withdrawals, and coordinated pump tactics fueled by social media misinformation.

Regulators also plan to build tools that automatically extract suspicious trading patterns by the second and minute, and to use text-analysis systems with artificial intelligence to flag potential market abuse. The announcement follows a widely reported error at Bithumb in which some users were credited with at least 2,000 bitcoin each instead of small promotional rewards, a blunder estimated at roughly $44 billion.

South Korea

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