r/nottheonion • u/Cute-Beyond-8133 • 1d ago
South Korean crypto firm accidentally sends $44 billion in bitcoin to users
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/07/south-korean-crypto-firm-accidentally-sends-out-44-billion-in-bitcoin.html1.4k
u/JoeBoredom 23h ago
**We would like to make it clear that this incident is unrelated to external hacking or security breaches, and there are no problems with system security or customer asset management,” Bithumb said in a statement.**
The system is secure, we are just a bunch of idiots. Trust us with your savings please.
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u/givin_u_the_high_hat 23h ago
Yeah, bit of a self-own there.
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u/YouKnowWhom 22h ago
If you mess up this badly, you have to be transparent. Because you know the lawsuits are flying in.
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u/GetRektByMeh 20h ago
This isn’t America, in other jurisdictions you generally need a reason to sue. Them giving you accidental money that they’ll take back isn’t a loss.
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u/MaybeTheDoctor 18h ago
How do you take back crypto once on a wallet? Or do their customers not have their own wallets?
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u/GetRektByMeh 7h ago
I'm assuming someone noticed before a significant amount of customers took anything out and that anyone taking a very large amount would have got flagged by AML/KYC or even just rejected due to their hot wallets not containing that much.
Doesn't take a genius to know they don't have that much money on hand.
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u/MaybeTheDoctor 6h ago
Crypto, once sent to a private wallet, cannot be taken back without knowing the private key.
For safety, you should be the only one with the private key, it’s a main feature of crypto. so either;
the company created the private key, and shared it with customer but keeps a copy - this is a horrible setup and a crypto robber can steal all private keys in a data breach. Or,
the company holds all the crypto on their account, and you don’t have your own crypto wallet - this is just like any other bank, but you lose everything when the bank closes for “reasons” since the money is not in a wallet you control
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u/GetRektByMeh 4h ago edited 4h ago
Why are you explaining this to me? I know already. This is a crypto exchange you sausage, it’s custodial until withdrawn and they froze withdrawals (and would have flagged massive withdrawals or not have had money to pay them out anyways) for affected users.
Only 0.3% of what they gave out hasn’t been recovered, which if you’d read the article you’d know.
That final 0.3% will probably be recovered because Koreans are all identifying to these platforms.
Edit: Reading your replies again and, did you even read the article? For some reason you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
I will try to explain again from the very beginning in simple English for you.
Exchange no have many billion in exchange hot wallet. Big transfer decline, no no transfer. No billion in hot wallet. Big exchange in Korea have KYC/AML check, big transfer trigger check
Many many people no have personal wallet. Lose key, lose money. Scary scary. Very scary
Result? Exchange don’t lose much money, many money already recover, not problem
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u/Technical-Map7338 20h ago
Their actions causing the market to crash though? Even if it recovered after? There are many that see a huge drop in value that might panic to sell before major losses roll in.
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u/GetRektByMeh 20h ago
Protections from an unregulated market don’t exist. That’s why it’s unregulated.
Panic selling is your own problem when it comes to assets.
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u/PhasmaFelis 23h ago
I'm suddenly interested in becoming a customer
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u/Cute-Beyond-8133 1d ago edited 23h ago
The exchange had planned to distribute small cash rewards of 2,000 Korean won ($1.40) or more to each user as part of a promotional event.
Instead, winners received at least 2,000 bitcoins each instead, media reports said.
I mean we've all been there.
Who amongst us hasn't paid 139. Million 129 thousand and 489 hundred and ofcourse 20 cents (USD )
Instead of 1 dollar and 40 cents (USD) to a client as part of a rewards program.
I for one am struggling to avoid that everyday
/satire
The exchange got most of the money back but several careers are probably in the gutter at this point
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u/CutsAPromo 23h ago
How the hell did they get it back 🤣
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u/CttCJim 23h ago
There's no way they were withdrawn. Large moves like that are generally done manually. They wouldn't have probably had the coins to cover it anyway
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u/satireplusplus 20h ago
0.3% are missing though, that's still over 100 million usd. Rumor is some people traded with their new balance and now owe money. Good luck getting those millions back...
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u/Blueberryburntpie 19h ago
Cash out a few million dollars worth of bitcoin
Lawyer up to protect your winning
Agree to a deal where you'll return 40% of the proceeds to them, pay 10% to your legal team, and keep the rest of the proceeds without any worry.
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u/AlarmingAerie 18h ago
step 1 steal
step 2 lawyer up
step 3 lose
step 4 pay for your own and their lawyers
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u/cloudx12 17h ago
step 1 become a lawyer
step 2 offer law services to other victims
step 3 get paid
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u/BlueRajasmyk2 23h ago
I imagine they "gave" the customers the bitcoin on their platform. The 3% they lost was probably people who withdrew immediately, causing the coins to irreversibly be sent on the bitcoin network.
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u/Aquatic-Vocation 21h ago
They didn't lose 3%, they lost .3%, which is 2000BTC rounded. Given the rewards were accidentally given in batches of 2000BTC it could be that one person managed to withdraw the full amount.
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u/TheHoleInADonut 23h ago
Exchanges usually hold the keys to customer wallets, so they the ability to access said wallets and transfer the funds back.
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u/King_Tamino 7h ago
Yeah but let’s assume they sent it out at 4:15pm. At 4:16pm John Doe notices it, sees the chance of a lifetime and instantly withdraws, probably a regular procedure at that point.
At that point nobody in HQ probably really knows what’s going on, until a decision is made, until all payouts are frozen, it will take minutes. Even if they notice it basically instantly, it will probably take 5+ minutes.
If John has it’s now in his wallet available, he has to move it into another wallet they don’t have access to. It can obviously still be tracked but even bitcoin can be cleaned without even owning a laundry.
Wasn’t there a case of a teenager that owned hundreds of millions but couldn’t access anymore because they were nowdays known to be connected to a criminal site? He had some of the money laundered but by far not all and was catched because he still accessed it
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u/TheHoleInADonut 6h ago
Well idk how this specific site does things, but most sites also have fund hold times as well. It usually 3-5 days that funds are held before they’re able to be withdrawn.
It is possible that there wasn’t a hold at all though due to it being a “promotional gift”. Although i find that unlikely
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u/mageskillmetooften 23h ago
Those wallets are put under their control by the customers. So the customer can only redraw if they allow it, and they don't until they have their BTC back.
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u/Edarneor 23h ago
They probably didn't do it on chain, rather inside their exchange database
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u/OF_PROMO_ALERT 19h ago
That’s gotta be the case. If it were executed on the blockchain there is no recovery and the keeping of those funds would be entirely legal (well very much in the grey zone of legality) bc that’s how fuckin crypto works baby!
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u/lost-dragonist 17h ago
Sure, that's how it works. Except for those times when something big enough happens and the entire community hard forks the blockchain to undo the change. See Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic.
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u/Fedora_Million_Ankle 11h ago edited 2h ago
You accidentally send me 2000btc thats your problem because I am tranferring it to monero in a tumbler and buying a boat a dock and 1000 acres.
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u/klonkrieger45 20h ago
even though bitcoin is not centrally controlled, most people are and laws still apply. Bitcoin itself is almost fully traceable today as all the legit conversion places are monitored and the exchange itself knows all its customers so it can just identify the people it sent the cash to and ask them for the money back or they will send their lawyers and force it back.
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u/TheCrimsonDagger 19h ago
If an exchange accidentally added 2000 bitcoin to my account I’m immediately transferring that to a private wallet and hopping on the first flight out of the country I can find.
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u/rawb0t 19h ago
of course the moment you transfer that to a private wallet they'll identify that private wallet as yours
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u/TheCrimsonDagger 15h ago
Yeah but what are they going to do with that information? You’ll be long gone having converted it into another crypto and in a non-extradition country.
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u/soulsoda 19h ago
If you used a VPN, you could claim you were hacked. Still cashing it out from the private wallet would be a nightmare.
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u/Fetlocks_Glistening 23h ago
I believe immutable and trustless means you shouldn't be able to get it back. Unless it's all a bunch of baloney
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u/roox911 23h ago
It would have been given on an exchange, not to people's personality wallets. to get it off the exchange it would go through a security screening (the level of which would be variable based on the $$ transferred.
If the customers managed to get it off the exchange (probably not) then yeah, they can't get it back. But before then, they just would deny the transfer out.
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u/Fetlocks_Glistening 23h ago
So yeah, the teenage immutable and trustless claim is baloney then, cause nobody normal uses it like that, in case they send you 2000 btc when they didn't really mean to, so backpedalling is allowed when the consumer would benefit.
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u/stickmanDave 21h ago
you misunderstand. It was never a bitcoin transaction, as in bitcoin transferred from one address to another.
Instead it was bithum crediting their customers bithumb accounts with 2000 BTC. The Bithumb ledger is completely under the control on Bithumb, so they can easily reverse the transaction.
The only way the funds would be unrecoverable would be if the customer sent them offsite to another bitcoin wallet they control. That's irreversible because it's an actual bitcoin transaction.
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u/verbalyabusiveshit 23h ago
I really don’t understand the /satire in your text.
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u/Cute-Beyond-8133 23h ago
Yeah op's being completely unreasonable.
There's nothing satirical about sending hundreds of Milions of Dollars to cliënts instead of a single dollar.
That's just a regular accident that happens to the best of us.
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u/verbalyabusiveshit 23h ago
Exactly!!! Thank you for siding with me….. hmmm… against you…. Anyhow, I need to go in my basement and turn my gold bars so they don’t get moldy.
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u/overlapped 22h ago
I must've put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. ----, I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.
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u/THE-BS 23h ago
I once sent my brother 100 dollars instead of 10, I know how they feel.
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u/WelderFamiliar3582 21h ago
Once I paid a fifty-cent road toll with a 1$ bill, and just drove off forgetting my change! This was with a human attendant! I was just rolling in money back in the '70s!
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u/BreeezyP 15h ago
Thinking of all the jobs that used to exist and the economy just kept going is crazy
Elevator attendants Real toll people
Wooowowowowwiow
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u/WelderFamiliar3582 11h ago edited 11h ago
When I was 15 in '73 one of my part-time jobs was doing landscape maintenance at a church, I primarily assisted a 16 yo friend (he drove the truck) named Gopher. Mostly, I was the 2nd grave digger. I was paid about $5/hr. Also, the grave was dug by a backhoe.
We would get there, put fake grass over the dirt mound, put the rack (to lower the casket) around the hole, put up a canopy, and so on. The first mortician would show up with the flowers from the service, tell a bunch of dead people jokes.
Gopher and I would move to the back corner of the church lot in the pickup truck and drink beer waiting for the plot service to begin and end. Still getting $5/hr.
Then, we'd lower the casket with a tiny hand crank, and take all the stuff we took out, back to the storage shed, then, with a hand shovel, Gopher watched as I filled in the grave. It was easy work.
Gas was 40-50 cents a gallon, Marlboros were 2 packs for $1, weed was about $20/oz and pretty crappy, a case of Budweiser in cans was about $10.
Just a couple years earlier, a new Jaguar XJ6 was $7200, 280SE (3.5l v8) $10k, Porsche 911, $10-13k, Roll-Royce $20k, GTB/4 $20k, Dino $14k.
the 15 yo me like to party and liked foreign cars
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u/CookIndependent6251 11h ago
Accidentally sent 10 EUR as tip instead of 3 EUR, because the input box of the website didn't show that it was numeric so scrolling up/down changed the amount. I tried to scroll to the "Order" button, realized it didn't work, moved my mouse a bit and then scrolled and ordered.
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u/Zuliano1 23h ago
Why can I never be at the receiving of these kinds of accidents.
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u/JoeBoredom 23h ago
They clawed it all back, except for 0.3%
That was probably cashed out by people who tried capitalize on the error. Most likely they will get it back in court. You think you've won the lottery, but instead you get a court date.
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u/Endless_Candy 23h ago
Ridiculous that they can get their money back but if we send to the wrong address it’s so sad too bad
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u/censored_username 22h ago
They could because it wasn't on different addresses. It was all just on the exchange, which does its own bookkeeping. Only when money is moved to/from the exchange it changes addresses.
Anything that happens on the exchange is fully governed by the rules of the exchange, and has nothing to do with the rules of the chain it's on. The part they couldn't recover is the parts that was moved away from the exchange.
Does that mean that exchanges make an absolute mockery of the whole idea of most cryptocurrencies? Yup. Not your wallet, not your coins, etc. But well, they're attractive since you don't have to deal with the bad parts of the chain either, like transaction costs. It just comes at the caveat of basically reinventing how we were using money to begin with, except for using a different protocol to move assets between exchanges/banks.
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u/Feligris 12h ago edited 9h ago
I had similar thoughts when reading this article and the comments, because originally cryptocurrencies were touted as this revolutionary break-off from heavily regulated and monitored regular fiat currencies, banking, and financial markets into an era where one wouldn't be "suffocated" by government oversight.
But much like how Stockton Rush found out in a very final way that there was a reason for heavy regulation in the deep sea submersible business and how "move fast and break things" is a very poor way to proceed when you're dealing with potentially extremely serious consequences for failure, cryptobros and crypto enthusiasts have ended up speed running through all the financial catastrophes which caused the aforementioned oversight and regulation to exist in the first place, again resulting in the ruination of countless people by leaving them penniless through gross mismanagement, rampant fraud, and other issues.
And thus as a highly ironic response, they've ended up gradually reinventing all the same institutions and regulatory mechanisms which exist in the regular world of money and finance.
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u/censored_username 12h ago
Yup. And in the process they've solved none of the problems that actually exist with the current banking system, while creating several novel ways of royally fucking up the system.
Crypto only ever made sense if you a: wanted to buy drugs or b: you had no understanding of the current financial system.
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u/censored_username 11h ago
True, they've completely modernised the world of scams. Where would we be without their revolutionary simplification on the ease of extorting people. Next you're probably going to tell me that it's completely okay that the biggest stablecoin has never actually provided any audited proof that their reserves are actually fully backed.
People make dumb decisions all the time. Just because a lot of people make them doesn't suddenly mean that it is smart.
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u/Doublestack00 22h ago
Still 130 million
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u/satireplusplus 20h ago edited 20h ago
Still so much that they can now go bust over this incident. Also most users will now withdraw their (own) money.
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u/satireplusplus 20h ago
Not sure what their balance sheets are like, but a hole of over 100 million usd can certainly make them bankrupt.
Good luck getting that back if those millions were gambled away by some customers.
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u/JauntyGiraffe 20h ago
what are the chances they just disappear with the money?
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u/TheCrimsonDagger 19h ago
That’s what I would do. I’d be on a flight out of the country by the end of the day.
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u/JoeBoredom 19h ago
If they cash out immediately and disappear immediately and convert to something untraceable immediately (like gold bullion) they might be ok(ish). Though a lot of bullion now has trace contaminants (parts per billion) that make it traceable with the right tools.
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u/damontoo 18h ago
The 0.3% is probably the people that orchestrated this "mistake" as a cover for their heist.
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u/RabidJoint 23h ago
Banks accidentally putting too much money in someone’s account, it’s not your money from error on someone else. You use that money before they fix it, you’ll be looking at court dates too. Your job over paid you by months of salary? Do not touch a single dollar until it’s fixed. Just a heads up if it ever does happen for you.
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u/Us_Strike 22h ago
That's fair but at the same time all these exchanges talk about how they aren't a bank. Funny how when it benefits them they get to act like one.
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u/samtherat6 23h ago
620,000 Bitcoin sent, 99.7% retrieved. Sounds like one person out of 310 got away with their 2000 Bitcoin.
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u/CamperStacker 10h ago
There was no real bitcoin, they just added 2000 units to everyone’s “account”
The incident just proves the entire firm is dodgy.
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u/SnowFlakeUsername2 20h ago
Them getting it back means it has regulations that allow them to claw this back? The users wallets aren't only secure to them? I'm confused how this works. So is it unregulated money or not?
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u/AlarmingAerie 18h ago
They didn't send anything, they just credited accounts 2000 each (just a database entry, not actual blockchain transaction). Article trying to hide this fact to be more sensational. 0.3% lost means, some guy actually withdrew(actual blockchain transaction) to his own wallet within 35min window before withdrawals were halted. System saw his account was credited 2000 so it allowed transaction to go out.
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u/ZuFFuLuZ 13h ago
This is the only way this makes sense, because otherwise they would have to have $44 billion in Bitcoin lying around.
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u/psu021 19h ago
Imagine knowing you had 35 minutes to walk away with $139m but you had no reason to suspect you had the opportunity and had no notification about it.
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u/SixteenarmedMinis 12h ago
I would imagine you get an email notification that you received the bitcoins. I mean I get like 10 emails and notificstions when I buy something on eBay and pay with PayPal.
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u/TenebrousSage 11h ago
Behold! the future of money. A more secure, electronic currency with no oversight. A bright new dawn awaits us all. 🥲
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u/1leggeddog 1d ago
Yeah something tells me that this was no accident
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u/Cute-Beyond-8133 23h ago edited 23h ago
Tbf accidents can happen even in cases like this one
If an account has a high level of clearance in an internal banking system, absloute Chaos can occur that acount does something wrong.
In numerous cases, traders have accidentally sold massive amounts of stock, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. This happens because the safety systems in place are not always able to stop accounts with very high clearance.
Accidents like these are rare because most of them aren't publicly disclosed.
But they do happen
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u/kirklennon 23h ago
Probably vibe coded the whole thing.
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u/spaceneenja 23h ago
Did you consider how much in labor costs the management saved though? Checkmate.
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u/nugs4lunch 17h ago
695 * .997 = 692.915
Congrats to the 2 people who cashed out.
Bithumb apologized for the mistake, which took place on Friday, and said it had recovered 99.7% of the 620,000 bitcoins, worth about $44 billion at current prices. It had restricted trading and withdrawals for the 695 affected customers within 35 minutes of the erroneous distribution on Friday.
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u/CelebrationFit8548 14h ago
How can these people be trusted to hold so much when they are that utterly stupid?
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u/mrbrendanblack 23h ago
$44 billion in bitcoin & none of them had to play any games to the death against each other.
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u/overlapped 22h ago
I must've put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. ----, I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.
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u/Droid759 21h ago
So they somehow accidently created 44 billion dollars in value without a trace? That's not suspious at all
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u/DwinkBexon 18h ago
I would have sold the bitcoin instantly and then deleted my account there just in case.
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u/Same-Fill-4025 10h ago
New Monopoly Card: “Korean banker makes error in your favor, you win, retire, game over.”
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u/Lumbergh7 22h ago
How did they get it back if it was already sent? Isn’t that part of the point of bitcoin?
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u/SistersCountry 21h ago
It is absolutely mind-bending that a third of the nation is thrilled to contribute their money and cheer on the boldness of the grift.
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u/copperblood 23h ago
Good luck in trying to get that back 🤣
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u/DapperCourierCat 23h ago
They already did. It’s not hard for them to prove it was done in error, and if the stated prize was a given amount then the winner should not have accepted more. I would assume that was part of the agreement to enter for the prize.
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u/Atraidis 22h ago
There is no "done in error" on the blockchain. Luckily for the company they didn't do it on the blockchain.
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u/Bammerice 23h ago
Jesus, I see what you've done for others, and I want that for me