SEOUL, June 13 -- South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission has fined Coupang 624.7 billion won, equivalent to about 409 million United States dollars, for a 2025 data breach that exposed names, phone numbers, addresses and order histories of 37.5 million customers and several million non-member delivery recipients. The penalty, formally delivered on Thursday, is the largest data-protection fine in the country's history, nearly five times the previous record, and lands squarely on the New York-listed company that has spent the last five years calling itself South Korea's Amazon.

The PIPC's investigation, which concluded in May, traced the breach to a former Coupang engineer who exploited a cryptographic signing key that th...