A South Korean court has ruled that users who profited from Bithumb’s incident of mistakenly sending Bitcoin must return the unjust enrichment.

Seoul Central District Court on August 27 handed down its first-instance ruling in the incident involving Bithumb, South Korea’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, over its mistaken distribution of bitcoin (BTC), ordering relevant users to return approximately 194 million won in proceeds from selling the mistakenly sent BTC. Bithumb had previously made an operational error in an activity reward program, mistakenly inputting BTC instead of won for rewards originally denominated in the local currency, leading to a total of around 620,000 BTC being misdistributed. In March, the exchange filed separate unjust enrichment lawsuits against four users who sold the mis-sent BTC and failed to return the proceeds; other related cases involve amounts of approximately 500 million won, 14.8 million won, and 5 million won. South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) earlier noted that the incident involved BTC with a book value of roughly 61 trillion won. (Digital Asset)