Alphabiz - Unauthorized Sales of CJ Olive Young Korean Accounts Found on Chinese E-commerce Platforms

Photo courtesy of Yonhap News

 

 

[Alpha Biz= Lee Joon Hyun] CJ Olive Young’s Korean customer accounts have been found listed for sale on major Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao, raising concerns about potential misuse of Korean retail accounts amid growing demand from foreign shoppers.

According to industry sources on December 5, multiple Taobao sellers were found offering Olive Young Korean accounts priced between 198 and 388 yuan (approximately KRW 87,000). Listings for personal accounts of other CJ affiliates, including CJ CGV and CJ ONE, were also detected, though the authenticity of these accounts has not yet been verified.

The appearance of these listings follows similar cases in which Korean Coupang accounts were sold on Taobao, coinciding with Coupang's recently disclosed data breach affecting approximately 33.7 million user accounts.

Olive Young has become a top shopping destination among foreign tourists, recording KRW 1 trillion in cumulative offline purchases by foreigners between January and November this year. This surge in demand is believed to be driving unauthorized attempts to sell Korean accounts to overseas shoppers—similar to past instances where Chinese “daigou” resellers sought access to Korean retail accounts for bulk purchases.

However, CJ Olive Young denied any connection between these listings and a data breach. A company official told AlphaBiz,
“This matter is unrelated to the Coupang incident. The accounts being sold on foreign online platforms are not the result of hacking or a personal data leak within our system.”
The official added,
“We cannot verify who the sellers are or whether the accounts listed are even genuine Olive Young accounts. This situation is fundamentally different from the recent large-scale Coupang data breach.”

 

 

Alphabiz 이준현 기자(wtcloud83@alphabiz.co.kr)