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| Lee Seung-gun, founder and CEO of Viva Republica, speaks during a press conference in 2019. Newsis |
By Anna J. Park
Toss Securities' foreign exchange service mistakenly provided a much lower won-dollar exchange rate for about 16 minutes on Wednesday afternoon even though the Korean currency continues to weaken against the greenback.
The error apparently gave some customers a brief window to make a handsome profit by trading their won holdings into dollars.
According to Standard Chartered (SC) Bank of Korea, which partnered with Toss Securities to offer foreign exchange services, the brokerage app listed an exchange rate of 1,298 won per dollar from 1:51 p.m. to 2:07 p.m. on Wednesday. That is about 10 percent lower than the normal rate at the time, which was about 1,440 won per dollar.
"The accident occurred during an upgrade of the bank's foreign exchange system provided to Toss Securities," an official from SC Bank of Korea explained. "The problem was soon fixed once the bank confirmed the error," the official added.
Many customers are said to have benefited from the lower won-dollar exchange rate during the 16-minute window. Some internet users claimed that they earned money, posting screenshots showing their transactions as proof. One of them claimed to have exchanged 200 million won into dollars. If that is true, the user should have earned around 20 million won from the exchange rate gap.
However, Toss Securities said it does not plan to retrieve those customers' profits generated from the foreign exchange rate error.
SC Bank of Korea vowed to prevent a reoccurrence of such errors in the future.
The won ended at 1,438.9 against the dollar on Thursday, a decrease of one won from the previous session on the Seoul foreign exchange market.
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