Upbit advertised a fee discount that never existed — 0.05% was always the price

Upbit, South Korea's largest crypto exchange, ran notices on its homepage promoting a discount event: the standard trading fee of 0.139% temporarily cut to 0.05%. The problem, the Fair Trade Commission found, was that 0.139% had never been charged — it was an internally reviewed figure that was never applied to general orders. And 0.05% was not a discount at all: it had been the exchange's standard fee continuously since Upbit opened in October 2017. The 'event' advertised a cut from a price that did not exist to the price everyone had always paid.

On 25 March 2026 the KFTC sanctioned Dunamu under the Fair Labeling and Advertising Act — the first time it had acted against a virtual-asset exchange over false fee advertising. The sanction was a corrective order with no surcharge: only five homepage notices were found false, and their exposure was under 0.1% of site traffic. Dunamu argued there was no intent to deceive — the wording began as a launch promotion, was kept for the customers' benefit, and the outdated 'discount' label was simply not noticed — and corrected the displays at once.

The KFTC's point stood regardless: fees are a decisive criterion when users choose an exchange, and presenting a never-applied rate as the standard price to advertise a discount from makes an exchange look cheaper than it is. That distortion hinders rational choice and undermines fair competition between exchanges — the reason the first-of-its-kind case was brought at all.