The Supreme Court of Korea ordered Bithump to pay a total of 251.4 million KWN ($202,400) on behalf of 132 investors as compensation for damages due to the platform’s temporary suspension, Yonhap reports.
The incident occurred on November 12, 2017. The services were down for about an hour and a half.
Initially the district court rejected the claim, forcing the investors to appeal. The Supreme Court delivered the opposite verdict.
“The burden of technical glitches must be borne by the service operator, not by its users who pay for the service,” the ruling states.
In early 2023, the National Tax Service of South Korea (NTS) begana special investigation into the operators of the cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb.
Following the prior investigation, at the end of 2019 the NTS demanded Bithumb Korea pay more than 80 billion won (~$69 million) in profits taxes earned from investments by foreign users of the platform.
In September 2020, the police carried out a series of searches at offices of companies linked to the exchange as part of a case into alleged fraud related to the $25 million token sale of BXA. At that time, the authorities summoned for questioning the CEO and chairman of the platform, Lee Jong-hoon.
In October 2022, it was reported that, on charges of deceiving investors, he could face up to eight years in prison. According to Yonhap, Hoon is considered the real owner of the exchange, and the NTS’s special investigation is presumably linked to his criminal case.
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