The exchange had planned to award buyers a small prize of 2,000 won ($1.37) each, but instead awarded them 2,000 bitcoins on Friday.
The Bithumb platform apologized for the error, adding that it quickly realized the oversight and recovered almost all of the missing tokens.
At the same time, the company said that within 35 minutes of the error, it restricted trading and withdrawals for 695 customers who were mistakenly sent bitcoins. They recovered 99.7 percent of the bitcoins.
“We want to make it clear that this issue has nothing to do with external hacking or security breaches, and that there are no issues with system security or customer asset management,” Bithumb said.
South Korea’s financial regulator held an emergency meeting and announced it would investigate the incident. Any sign of illegal activity will prompt formal investigations, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) said.
The company Bithumb also announced the improvement of the verification system, including the introduction of artificial intelligence to detect abnormal transactions, in order to prevent similar mistakes in the future.
(Vijesti.ba)
