South Korea police raid e-commerce giant Coupang over data leak

SEOUL – South Korean police raided on Dec 9 the headquarters of

e-commerce giant Coupang over a recent data leak

believed to have affected more than 33 million customers.

Coupang is South Korea’s most popular online shopping platform, serving millions of customers with lightning-fast deliveries of products from groceries to gadgets.

But the company

suffered a massive data leak

in 2025

, telling customers that their names, email addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses and some order histories had been exposed.

Payment details and login credentials were not affected.

Coupang told the authorities the personal information of 33.7 million customers had been leaked – almost two-thirds of the population of the country.

On Dec 9, police said they were “conducting a search and seizure operation at Coupang’s headquarters”, describing it as a “necessary measure to accurately understand the incident”.

Seventeen officers from the Seoul metropolitan police’s cyber investigation unit were deployed, with law enforcement vowing to “comprehensively investigate” based on the evidence obtained.

Last week, South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung

called for swift action to penalise those responsible

for the debacle.

Seoul has said the leak took place through Coupang’s overseas servers from June 24 to Nov 8.

But the company only became aware of it in November, according to police and local media, who said the company had issued a complaint in November against the alleged culprit – a former employee who is a Chinese national.

The firm is now facing a class action lawsuit in the United States, where its global headquarters is based, over the leak, Yonhap reported.

Seoul’s presidential office said on Dec 8 that the firm needed to provide answers over how it would compensate users who have had data stolen.

“Coupang must present clear measures outlining how it will take responsibility if damages occur,” presidential chief of staff Kang Hoon-sik said, according to Yonhap.

The case follows a major breach at South Korea’s largest mobile carrier SK Telecom, which was fined 134 billion won (S$118 million) in August after a cyberattack exposed data on nearly 27 million users.

South Korea, among the world’s most wired countries, has also been a target of hacking by arch-rival North Korea.

Police announced in 2024 that North Korean hackers were behind the theft of sensitive data from a South Korean court computer network – including individuals’ financial records – over a two-year period.

In November, Yonhap reported that South Korean authorities suspected a North Korean hacking group may be behind the recent cyberattack on cryptocurrency exchange Upbit, which led to the unauthorised withdrawal of 44.5 billion won in digital assets. AFP