South Korea FIU Fines Korbit $1.88 Million, Issues Institutional Warning

South Korea's Financial Intelligence Unit fined cryptocurrency exchange Korbit 2.73 billion won (about $1.88 million) and issued an institutional warning on Dec. 31 for violating anti-money-laundering obligations under the Act on Reporting and Using Specified Financial Transaction Information. The FIU also issued a caution to the exchange's representative director and a reprimand to its anti-money-laundering reporting officer. The measures follow an on-site inspection conducted from Oct. 16 to Oct. 29, 2024, in which the FIU identified three major compliance breaches: approximately 22,000 customer due diligence and transaction restriction violations including accepting ambiguous identification documents, allowing trading when customer information was incomplete, and failing to perform periodic re-verification; 19 asset transfer transactions with three unregistered overseas virtual asset service providers; and failure to perform money laundering risk assessments before listing 655 new assets such as NFTs.