Coupang: 2,297 staff wrote 72,614 fake reviews — record ₩140B fine

In June 2024 South Korea's antitrust regulator, the Fair Trade Commission, fined Coupang 140 billion won ($102 million) — the largest penalty it had ever imposed on a distribution company. The ruling covered two coordinated deceptions running since 2019: Coupang employees wrote 72,614 positive reviews of its own products, and its search algorithm was tweaked to push Coupang's own items to the top of results.

The scale is what made it a national scandal. 2,297 employees — nearly a tenth of the workforce — wrote reviews for at least 7,342 of the company's own products, averaging 4.8 out of 5 stars. The search manipulation, run from February 2019 to July 2022, placed 64,250 Coupang products at the top of rankings while demoting more than 400 million listings from 210,000 third-party sellers; sales of the favoured items rose more than 76%.

Coupang said it regretted the fine and insisted its recommendations were based on quality, price, sales and customer reviews. The regulator's finding showed something simpler: a marketplace had weaponized its own platform against its own sellers, and the fake reviews were written by the company's own staff.