Coupang files lawsuits against 620 bil. won fine over data leak

By Yonhap

• Published Oct 8, 2026 8:29 PM KST

E-commerce firm Coupang Corp. has filed lawsuits against 620 billion won ($462 million) in fines levied by a state-run data protection agency over its massive data leak, sources said Thursday.

According to the sources, Coupang has filed two separate suits with the Seoul Administrative Court seeking to nullify the fines imposed by the Personal Information Protection Commission in June this year.

The Commission fined Coupang a record 624.7 billion won over privacy violations, including a massive data breach that affected more than 37 million users.

The amount breaks down to a record fine of 423.6 billion won for the data breach and levies an additional 201.1 billion-won fine for the unauthorized collection of records of online user activities and other violations.

It marked the largest fine ever imposed by the regulator on a single company, according to the commission.

The punitive measures came more than six months after Coupang belatedly reported a large-scale data breach last November of personal information of users in Korea, including their names, phone numbers and delivery details.

The regulator concluded that a hacker behind the breach accessed personal information of about 37.5 million users — 33.2 million Coupang members and 4.3 million others.

Under the personal information protection law, companies that suffer personal information leaks can be fined up to 3 percent of their annual sales, although sales from businesses unrelated to the violation can be excluded.

Coupang logged about 36 trillion won in annual sales on average in the past three years.

The e-commerce company's massive data leak had also emerged as a source of friction between Seoul and Washington after some U.S. officials and lawmakers raised concerns about whether the Korean unit of the U.S.-listed Coupang Inc. was being treated unfairly in the investigation.