As Toss Bank decided to cancel currency exchange transactions made during the Japanese yen exchange rate error incident and to claw back the exchanged amounts, user backlash is growing. They argue that canceling transactions after the fact or recouping gains on transactions concluded due to a bank system error is unfair.
On the 12th, posts criticizing Toss Bank's clawback policy flooded online communities and social media (SNS). They said it is true Toss Bank set the yen rate incorrectly, but the transaction itself was executed normally, so canceling it later is hard to accept.
A Toss Bank user wrote on an online community, "This happened because of the bank's mistake, so is it right to post one notice and take the money back?" Some users also posted that they would consider suing Toss Bank.
At about 7:29 p.m. on the 10th, an error occurred in the Toss Bank application that displayed the Japanese yen exchange rate at about 472 won per 100 yen. That was about half the actual rate of about 934 won at the time. The rate display returned to normal in about seven minutes, but in the meantime about 40,000 people reportedly exchanged a total of 28 billion won into yen. The market estimates that Toss Bank suffered losses in the 10 billion won range due to this error.
The previous day, Toss Bank announced in a notice titled "Notice of planned correction (cancellation) of transactions due to yen exchange rate display error" that it would cancel transactions made at the incorrectly displayed rate. It said it would retrieve the yen held by customers and refund the won used to purchase the yen.
If the exchanged yen has already been used for card payments, remittances, or withdrawals, the bank plans to settle by withdrawing from the balance in order from the foreign currency account to the Toss Bank won account.
User backlash is particularly tied to the "automatic exchange" feature. Automatic exchange is a service in which the system automatically executes currency exchange when the rate meets conditions set by the user. It is reported that some users who subscribed to the rate alert service also received a message saying "The yen exchange rate is the lowest in the past three months."
One user wrote on SNS, "If that's the case, why operate the automatic exchange feature?" and said, "It is astonishing in itself to plan to retrieve later a transaction concluded due to a bank error." Another user said, "Customers only exchanged at the posted rate, so saying it will be retrieved after the fact is hard to accept," and added, "Shouldn't the automatic exchange conditions have been set more strictly?"
Some users are said to have already withdrawn funds from their accounts and now lack sufficient balances. In such cases, Toss Bank is expected to have difficulty retrieving funds directly from customer accounts.
Toss Bank plans to request voluntary returns from users with insufficient balances. A Toss Bank official said, "We plan to provide return guidance through application notifications or KakaoTalk messages," and added, "We will determine our subsequent response based on the recovery rate."
This is not the first time a rate error has occurred in a Toss-affiliated service. In September 2022, Toss Securities' exchange service also had an error in which the won–dollar rate was displayed lower than the actual rate for about 25 minutes. At that time, while the intraday rate was above 1,440 won, it was displayed around 1,290 won, allowing some users to gain exchange profits, but Toss Securities did not take separate clawback measures.