Prosecutors sold all the bitcoins they had lost to a phishing attack and later recovered from a hacker — roughly 31.59 billion KRW (31,588,630,000 KRW; approximately $23,691,472.50) — and transferred the proceeds to the national treasury.
The Gwangju District Prosecutors’ Office said on the 10th that it sold about 320 recovered bitcoins and turned the proceeds over to the state.
The office said it carried out the sales over 11 days, from the 24th of last month through the 6th of this month, to avoid disrupting the bitcoin market. Through that process, it credited roughly 31.59 billion KRW (31,588,630,000 KRW; approximately $23,691,472.50) to the national treasury.
Earlier, in January, the Gwangju prosecutors found that bitcoins they had seized and were holding as criminal proceeds had gone missing. The missing assets were the entire 320.88 bitcoins that the Supreme Court had ordered forfeited from a defendant identified as A.
Prosecutors had charged A and A’s father, B, with operating an online bitcoin gambling operation in Thailand between 2018 and 2021 and receiving 24,613 bitcoins as part of that scheme.
As police pressure closed in, B created a new illegal gambling site that relied on bitcoin and, after he was imprisoned, transferred control of the site to his daughter, A. A then brought about 1,800 bitcoins into South Korea and hid them.
Police, acting on a tip, seized 320 bitcoins, but someone had already accessed A’s account and siphoned off roughly 1,470 additional coins.
An appellate court ordered the forfeiture of the 320.88 seized bitcoins in February 2024.
After that judgment became final, prosecutors checked the electronic wallet to execute the forfeiture order and found the bitcoins were gone.
An internal investigation determined the coins had been lost in August of last year. Prosecutors believe staff, while demonstrating the handover of seized property, accessed a phishing site instead of the legitimate site and the bitcoins were stolen.
Prosecutors recovered all of the missing bitcoins on Jan. 17, when the hacker who had taken them appears to have returned the funds to the office’s electronic wallet.
The prosecutors are tracking the hacker and conducting a concurrent internal inquiry to determine precisely how the loss occurred.
\"We will continue a rigorous investigation to clarify the full facts of the case,\" a prosecutor said.
