Dunamu, the company behind South Korea’s largest crypto exchange Upbit, has filed a formal objection to a record ₩35.2 billion fine. The move has temporarily halted regulators from collecting the penalty while the case undergoes review.
The penalty came from South Korea’s Financial Intelligence Unit, a division of the Financial Services Commission. The FIU said in November last year that Dunamu broke anti-money laundering rules under the Specified Financial Transaction Information Act.
Why Regulators Fined Upbit’s Operator
The FIU accused Dunamu of serious failures in customer verification and suspicious-activity reporting. Inspectors said they found about 5.3 million cases where Upbit accepted weak or incomplete ID checks, including blurry or altered documents.
Regulators added that approximately 3.3 million transactions were processed for users whose verification was incomplete. They also cited 15 cases in which Dunamu failed to report suspected money laundering, even after prosecutors requested search-and-seizure warrants for some users’ trading records.
Dunamu’s Defense in Court and What Comes Next
Dunamu argues the regulators treated Upbit more harshly than rival exchanges facing similar issues. At a December hearing, its legal team said other platforms faced comparable issues but did not face such strong early penalties.
The company also says a single violation of Article 8 of the AML law should not justify both a record fine and a business suspension. Dunamu notes that the FIU overturned certain prior actions against other exchanges in court and hopes to use those rulings as precedent.
The fine is the largest ever for violations of Korea’s Specified Financial Information rules, so the appeal is widely watched. Along with the financial penalty, regulators also ordered a three‑month halt to new customer onboarding and issued warnings to Upbit executives.
The objection temporarily stops enforcement while the courts and the Financial Intelligence Unit review the case. The ultimate verdict could influence future sanctions on the local cryptocurrency industry and help define how strictly South Korea enforces anti-money-laundering requirements for large exchanges.
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