Overview
- South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission imposed a 210 million won fine on Bithumb for transferring user information overseas without meeting legal requirements.
- The PIPC found that Bithumb shared order-book and other trading data with foreign platforms and sent personal identifiers to multiple overseas exchanges, prompting a corrective order to fix its transfer procedures and disclosures.
- Regulatory action builds on a March FIU sanction that fined Bithumb 36.8 billion won and found about 6.65 million individual AML/KYC breaches, signaling systemic compliance failures.
- Pending amendments to the Personal Information Protection Act set for September 2026 will allow fines up to 10% of a company’s revenue for serious breaches and create direct accountability for CEOs, increasing legal and financial risk for exchanges.
- The enforcement follows a prior 2017 data-breach fine and highlights how routine industry practices like order-book sharing can trigger privacy and AML scrutiny, raising compliance costs and uncertainty for users and platforms.