South Korea’s BitHub mistakenly sends $42 billion in Bitcoin

ISLAMABAD: Imagine you want to send someone $400 but accidentally send $40 billion. What happens next?

It may be hard to believe, but something similar happened to South Korea’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, which is now trying to recover more than $40 billion worth of cryptocurrency.

But why is this happening? The reason is that the exchange called Bithub mistakenly sent 620,000 bitcoins to users instead of 620,000 Korean won.

According to a statement issued by the company, most of the bitcoins that were mistakenly credited by it have been recovered, but $9 million worth of bitcoins still could not be recovered because users sold them or withdrew the funds before the error was discovered.

This happened on February 6 when an employee of the crypto exchange sent bitcoins instead of Korean currency for the reward money of users.

This was being done for a promotional event and the company was supposed to give away 620,000 won ($423) worth of prizes to 695 users.

But instead of the Korean currency, the employee sent 620,000 bitcoins (worth $42 billion).

Of the 695 users, 249 opened their prize boxes and received their prizes.

Lee Chun-jin, governor of South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), called it a disaster for users who sold the bitcoins they received as prizes.

Bitcoin prices have surged in recent days and Lee Chun-jin said the incident pointed to internal flaws in the company.

According to experts, users who sold the prize bitcoins could face criminal charges because cryptocurrency is not legal under Korean criminal law.

According to BitHub, 99.7 Bitcoins have been recovered so far, for which the process of sending rewards was reversed internally and an apology was sent, but 86 users had sold 1788 Bitcoins.

Now the company is talking to these users one by one and they have been asked to give the company the equivalent amount of Bitcoin.