South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) has reportedly sent an inspection opinion letter to Dunam, the operator of the Upbit cryptocurrency exchange, in connection with the November 2025 $36 million hack.

Local news site Yonhap News reported Sunday that FSS recently sent a letter with an inspection opinion to Dunam.

The letter marks the formal launch of the sanctions procedure by the financial authorities. This gives Dunamu the opportunity to respond to the inspection findings before the regulatory authority notifies the company of the proposed sanctions.

Cointelegraph has asked Dunam for a comment on this matter.

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According to Yonhap, Upbit faced criticism for delaying the announcement of the $36 million exploit.

The breach lasted approximately 54 minutes and began at 4:42 a.m. KST on November 27, but Upbit only announced the breach slow in the day after a merger event involving internet giant Naver Financial ended.

The financial supervision authority said it was checking whether the exchange had violated the Act on the Protection of Users of Virtual Assets, which does not provide for direct sanctions related to cyberattacks or computer intrusions.

The report indicated that South Korean authorities plan to fill the regulatory gap by adding provisions on sanctions and compensation for hacking and computer system failures to the second phase of the Digital Assets Basic Law.

Upbit refunds users and launches an onchain tracking system to recover funds

In statement following the November exploit, Upbit said it had frozen funds worth about 2.3 billion won ($1.5 million). The exchange said it would fully refund affected customers using its own balance sheet assets.

Upbit said it initiated reviewing the cryptocurrency wallet architecture to address potential post-exploit vulnerabilities and migrating all assets from affected wallets.

In December 2025 Upbit he said has developed an automatic onchain tracking service, Onchain AI Tracer System, to trace the path of stolen funds and aid potential recovery efforts.

Upbit ranks third on the CoinMarketCap cryptocurrency exchange rankingsbased on results including traffic, liquidity and trading volume.

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