South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb has filed for a court-backed asset freeze against users who still hold seven Bitcoin from a February 2026 payout mistake. Back then, a single input error caused the exchange to send 620,000 BTC instead of 620,000 Korean won, briefly pushing the accidental transfer's value above $42 billion.
One typo, $42 billion on the books
On February 6, 2026, a Bithumb employee was processing a marketing payout: a combined 620,000 Korean won (about $420 total) split across 249 contest winners. An input error caused the system to read the amount as a token quantity, crediting 620,000 BTC total to the winners' accounts - worth roughly 62 trillion KRW ($42 billion) at the time. The transactions ran through Bithumb's internal ledger rather than the blockchain, but the balances on users' accounts were real.
Some users converted a portion of the credited funds before the exchange caught the error and shut down operations. That window lasted just a few minutes.
99.7% back on day one - but not everyone returned the funds
On the day of the incident, Bithumb contacted each of the 249 participants individually and recovered 99.7% of the mistakenly sent funds. For the 1,788 BTC that users had already converted through trades, Bithumb covered the gap from its own reserves rather than passing losses to other customers.
In the weeks that followed, the exchange continued pursuing the rest through direct communication and recovered nearly all of it. Seven BTC remains with a small group of holdouts who argue that the error was the exchange's fault and that they bear no obligation to return what landed in their accounts. That argument is unlikely to hold up in court. South Korean law treats mistakenly received assets as unjust enrichment, requiring return regardless of how they arrived.
Court filing: freeze first, lawsuit second
On April 8, Bithumb filed for a provisional attachment - a court-approved measure that freezes a defendant's assets before a civil lawsuit begins. It is a standard tool in Korean civil proceedings, used when creditors want to prevent asset transfers during litigation. The main civil claim for return of funds will follow separately.
Legal experts familiar with the case told local media that the holdouts are likely to lose if the matter goes to a full hearing. Bithumb has not publicly commented on the details of the court filing.
FSC steps in: reconcile every 5 minutes
The February incident triggered a broader regulatory review. In early April, South Korea's Financial Services Commission (FSC) audited the country's five major crypto exchanges and found that three of them reconciled internal ledgers against actual asset holdings only once per day. Under that schedule, an error like Bithumb's could theoretically go undetected for up to 24 hours.
The FSC responded by ordering all exchanges to reconcile every five minutes - a standard two of the five largest platforms were already meeting. The new rule is a direct response to the Bithumb incident and sets a clearer minimum for operational controls across the Korean crypto market.
What this means going forward
Seven BTC is a rounding error for an exchange of Bithumb's size. The case matters more as a test of how Korean courts handle unjust enrichment claims in a crypto context. If Bithumb wins, it sets a usable precedent for exchanges that face similar errors. The FSC's five-minute reconciliation rule, though, is the lasting change - it narrows the window for operational mistakes to grow before anyone notices.
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