The Financial Services Commission has detected individuals suspected of unfair trading in the virtual asset market and has reported them to the prosecution, imposing a penalty surcharge for the first time to recover unjust profits. This is the first instance of financial penalties being applied for unfair trading in virtual assets.
On the 3rd, the Financial Services Commission announced at its 12th regular meeting that it had resolved to report and impose penalty surcharges for unfair trading cases involving large-scale capital mobilization for price manipulation, the spread of false information through social media (SNS), and abuse of price linkage between virtual asset exchanges.
In particular, an investor referred to as a 'big whale' in the virtual asset market is suspected of concentrating their purchases of multiple virtual assets by injecting hundreds of millions of won into a specific exchange, raising prices by placing high-price buy orders, and then selling all at once to pocket hundreds of millions of won in unjust profits. It was revealed that this process also involved bringing volumes from overseas exchanges into the domestic market for sale.
Unfair trading using social media (SNS) was also detected. The suspect is reported to have bought virtual assets in advance and spread false positive information online to induce buying momentum, selling their holdings for a profit of hundreds of millions of won as prices rose. This is the first instance of financial authorities investigating and taking action against SNS-based unfair trading.
In another case, unfair trading was conducted by abusing the price conversion system offered by a virtual asset exchange to manipulate the Bitcoin price in the tether market through wash trading, distorting the prices of other market coins to appear as if they were rising. The Financial Services Commission imposed its first penalty surcharge since the implementation of the Virtual Asset User Protection Act for this incident, and the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) mandated improvements to require exchanges to display average prices in won.
A Financial Services Commission official noted, 'We will rigorously investigate and sanction unfair trading in the virtual asset market just as in the capital markets,' emphasizing the commitment to continue monitoring and improving systems for investor protection and establishing a sound trading order.