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Photo courtesy of Mirae Asset Securities |
[Alpha Biz= Kim Jisun] SEOUL, November 10, 2025 — South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) has issued an “Institutional Caution” (기관주의) sanction against Mirae Asset Securities for a series of system failures and a personal data leak, holding the firm accountable for investor losses caused by trading disruptions and internal control lapses.
According to the FSS, Mirae Asset was fined ₩121.6 million (US $87,000) and formally reprimanded for violating the Electronic Financial Transactions Act and the Credit Information Act. The regulator cited failures to maintain system stability and to notify customers promptly after discovering that personal information had been exposed.
The sanction follows a major trading outage on March 19, 2021, when a surge in mobile trading system (MTS) traffic caused widespread service delays during market opening. Dozens of investors were unable to execute trades in time.
An investigation revealed that between 2018 and 2021, Mirae Asset did not conduct regular analyses of MTS usage trends, and made repeated program changes without adequate testing, resulting in deposit calculation errors and temporary trading halts.
In addition, the company failed to submit mandatory cybersecurity review reports within the required seven-day period on several occasions between 2018 and 2022.
The FSS also confirmed a data-exposure incident in which, due to a “fallback login” system flaw, users could access other customers’ names and account details without a password between February 2019 and March 2021.
Although Mirae Asset became aware of the issue, it did not inform customers until after the FSS launched an inspection.
As part of the disciplinary action, the FSS imposed salary reductions and reprimands on five current employees and advisory-level warnings on three former executives and staff.
Separately, the FSS also sanctioned six Meritz Securities employees for insider trading and unauthorized investment activities.
One real-estate project-finance (PF) manager was found to have diverted approximately ₩9 billion (US $6.5 million) in fees by disguising payments to a consulting firm controlled by a related party.
The FSS classified the act as a breach of the Capital Markets Act’s insider-information ban.
Other Meritz staff members were disciplined for trading convertible bonds and related stocks via third-party accounts, and for failing to report such activities as required.
The company had previously faced similar scrutiny after a senior executive was caught earning ₩10 billion (US $7 million) in profits from real-estate trades based on undisclosed project information.
Alphabiz Reporter Kim Jisun(stockmk2020@alphabiz.co.kr)
