Toss Bank disclosed on Oct. 22 a financial incident worth 32.49 billion won. Around 2:20 p.m. on Oct. 7, transfers from other institutions that had actually failed were recorded as deposits in Toss Bank accounts. Roughly 80% has been corrected; 7.29 billion won is still being recovered.
Thirty minutes of phantom deposits
An error struck during an update of the bank's internal remittance system. Some money sent from other banks to Toss Bank had failed in reality, yet the recipient's screen showed it as received.
The glitch lasted about 30 minutes and was confirmed after customers asked about it. The bank says the system was fixed right away and all transfers now work normally.
252 billion of 325 billion won handled
Of the disclosed 32,493,696,000 won, 25,205,653,000 won has been corrected or recovered, leaving 7,288,043,000 won. Headlines say "80%"; the exact share is closer to 77 to 78%.
Toss Bank posted a notice on the day and, after the Chuseok holiday, began notifying affected customers and correcting transactions from Oct. 12. The final expected loss has not been fixed.
Is my money safe?
The bank says no money was actually withdrawn from accounts at other institutions, so neither senders nor recipients lost money directly. Where customers spent money that merely looked deposited, the bank contacts them individually to correct it.
A dedicated hotline is running, and a response team including the chief consumer-protection officer and the CTO is tracking progress.
What Toss Bank promises next
An IT internal-control task force led directly by CEO Lee Eun-mi will bring together IT, organisational-culture and compliance teams to review operations and controls.
"We apologise deeply to our customers," the bank said.
Dusk at the crossing of Teheran-ro and Yeongdong-daero in Gangnam, Seoul (taken December 2022; file photo, not related to Toss Bank or this incident). kallerna / CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
