South Korean exchange Bithumb accidentally sent users bitcoin worth about $44 billion on February 6, 2026, during a promotional event that was supposed to pay small cash rewards instead, per Reuters and CNBC reports of February 7. The exchange said it recovered 99.7 percent of it, leaving roughly $130 million outstanding.
L4 News publishes information, not investment advice. Crypto assets are volatile — they can lose most or all of their value quickly — and this incident is a story about bookkeeping errors, not a signal about bitcoin itself.
What actually happened at Bithumb?
A rewards program misfired. Customers due modest cash rewards were credited bitcoin instead — more than 620,000 BTC in total, about $44 billion at the time, per CNBC's February 7, 2026 report. Bithumb apologized and said 99.7 percent was recovered, with the remaining 0.3 percent, roughly $130 million, still being traced.
An exchange balance is a database entry, not a set of physical coins — the analogy to a wallet breaks down here, because Bithumb's fix was largely accounting: reversing credits before customers withdrew. That is also why a number this absurd did not sink the company.
If money lands in your account by mistake, is it yours?
No — in most legal systems it never was. Funds credited in error are held under mistaken-payment rules: keeping them can be unjust enrichment, and spending them can be prosecuted as theft. The fact that a computer put the money there is not a defense anyone has successfully relied on.
Courts have shown how this ends. In a widely reported Australian case, Crypto.com transferred 10.5 million Australian dollars to a customer instead of a 100-dollar refund in 2021; she was jailed in 2023 after spending much of it. The scale in Seoul was bigger, the legal logic identical.
What should you do if an exchange credits you by mistake?
Treat it as radioactive, not as luck. Do not withdraw, trade or spend it; take a screenshot of the balance with the date visible; and report it to the exchange through its official support channel. If the exchange reverses the entry — as Bithumb did for almost all of its error — your balance simply returns to normal.
What you should not do is wait quietly and hope nobody noticed. Exchanges reconcile their ledgers, and the person who spent mistaken funds is the easiest party to find: the exchange knows the account, the withdrawals and the destination addresses.
Does this say anything about exchange safety?
It says operational errors happen even at large firms, and that recovery depends on how fast the firm catches it. Bithumb recovered 99.7 percent within roughly a day of the February 6 error, per its statements reported on February 7 — quick, but not total.
The self-custody trade-off runs both ways: holding your own keys removes the exchange's bookkeeping from the equation, while adding your own responsibility for backups. Neither option eliminates human error; they just decide whose error it is.
For more context, read Strategy's $216 million bitcoin sale, explained.
For more context, read crypto exchange delisting.
For more context, read The UK published its final crypto rules June 30.
