The leaders of the Korean cryptocurrency exchange UPbit accused of fraud

The Seoul Prosecutor’s Office has accused three UPbit executives, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea, of fraud.  

Executives, including founder Sun Ji-Hyung, are supposed to commit fraudulent transactions from September to December of last year using a fake corporate account. They made fake orders in the amount of 254 trillion won (or 226.2 billion US dollars) to inflate the trading volume and attract more customers to the exchange.

They are also accused of selling 11,550 BTC to customers in order to receive 150 billion Korean won (or 133.8 million dollars) through falsified transactions.

However, yesterday UPbit published a message in which it denied the charges:  

The company provided liquidity to the corporate account in order to stabilize the trading market at the beginning of the service opening. This is the period from September 24 to December 11, 2017.  

UPbit representatives also added that the corporate account does not have a withdrawal function, and the exchange “did not win or trade” in the process. Although they nevertheless admitted that they had made some deals at an early stage for marketing purposes, these deals did not affect the market and accounted for about 3% of the total at that time.

Recall that in March, the exchange was already suspected of fraud due to the alleged sale of cryptocurrency to customers, which it does not actually own.

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