The Gwangju District Prosecutor’s Office sold all 320 (BTC) obtained from hackers and returned it to the national treasury.
Bitcoin theft
According to an article published by Chosun Ilbo, the Gwangju District Prosecutors’ Office announced on March 10 that it “sold all 320.8 bitcoins at market price and returned 31.5 billion won to the national treasury.” The bitcoins were originally seized from Ms. A, the daughter of the operators of a ₩390 billion illegal gambling ring, although the seized bitcoins were later lost in the process of being transferred to the national treasury. They were then restored on February 18, when “the bitcoins were returned to the existing wallet, where prosecutors controlled the keys without their knowledge”, as reported by the Korean news agency Digital Asset.
From phishing fiasco to full recovery
The recovered bitcoins were liquidated on the domestic exchange, amounting to about ₩31 billion, which has now been transferred to the National Treasury. Prosecutors say they held the sale over an 11-day period, from February 24 to March 6, to avoid disrupting market prices while an internal investigation into how the assets were lost in the first place continues.
Repeat event
This is not the first time South Korea has faced a major storage failure. In February, authorities accidentally leaked private keys in government documents, leading to the theft of 4 million tokens worth about $4.8 million. This repeated incident raises the serious question of whether governments, or at least the SK government, are willing to protect the seized digital assets.
It’s worth noting that South Korea is rapidly building a legal and operational ledger for confiscated crypto, and the Supreme Court recently ruled that bitcoin held on local exchanges can legally be treated as “confiscated property” under the Criminal Procedure Law.
For traders, the Kwangju sale is another reminder that law enforcement enforcement is now a structural source of BTC supply, and for politicians, it highlights that confiscating coins is only half the battle: securing them and exiting positions without markets is quickly becoming a new type of risk to market sovereignty.
BTC's price trends to the upside on the daily chart. Source: BTCUSD on Tradingview
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