Image Credit: Pixabay (Image credit: Pixabay)

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• Coupang breach exposed data of 33.7M customers, one of South Korea’s largest cyberattacks
• Company offers $35 vouchers as compensation, usable only on Coupang services
• Lawmakers and consumer groups criticize settlement as marketing, police launch investigation

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In South Korea, people’s personal information is worth roughly the same as a meal in a sit-down restaurant - around $35. Or at least, that's what the latest data breach settlement suggests.

South Korean e-commerce behemoth Coupang announced it would settle with 33.7 million customers whose data it lost in a recent cyberattack. In November 2025, an unnamed threat actor broke into Coupang’s IT infrastructure and exfiltrated people’s names, emails, phone numbers, shipping addresses, and specific order information.

The attack is widely considered as among the biggest ones in the country’s history, triggering law enforcement investigations, and threats of class-action lawsuits.

A "ridiculous" idea

Now, Coupang announced a compensation deal worth 1.69 trillion won, or roughly $1.18 billion. As per the deal, each customer will get a voucher for 50,000 won, which converts to $34.6 at press time. Funny enough, the vouchers can only be spent at Coupang, meaning that after removing any margins, the cost to the company will be even lower.

This angered some lawmakers in the country even more. Reuters reports that Choi Min-hee, a lawmaker of the ruling Democratic Party and chair of the National Assembly's Science, ICT, Broadcasting and Communication committee, said in a Facebook post that Coupang was "bundling coupons for services no one uses".

She also said the company is trying to turn a crisis into a business opportunity.

Consumer advocacy group Korea National Council of Consumer Organizations said Coupang's plan ridicules the victims and downplays the importance of the breach. It described the settlement as a “marketing tool” built to fuel more sales, rather than actually compensating the victims.

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Less than two weeks after the breach, the police sent 17 investigators to conduct a search and seizure at the company’s Songpa-gu offices. As per the local media, “this search and seizure is an essential measure to accurately understand the case,” and “to comprehensively investigate the overall facts of the case, including the leaker of personal information, the route of the leak, and the cause.”

Via Reuters

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Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.

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