"Lost 2.2 Billion Won": Bankruptcy Post Found to Be a Manipulation That Inflated Someone Else's 220 Million Won Loss by 10 Times

[Financial News] A post that drew attention for claiming that an investor had "lost 2.2 billion won saved over 40 years and gone bankrupt" after investing in a single-stock leveraged exchange-traded fund (ETF) tied to SK hynix has been confirmed as a manipulated post that inflated another investor's verified account loss by 10 times.

This newspaper reported the post that appeared on the secondhand trading community Carrot on the 30th of last month. After receiving a tip that the original verification photo existed separately, we checked it and found that the account screen attached to the Carrot post had been inflated by exactly 10 times from the figures in a real loss verification screen posted a day earlier, on the 29th, in Toss Securities' "KODEX SK Hynix Single Stock Leverage ETF" community.
In the original photo, the final loss was 220,436,099 won (-78.7%), but the manipulated post showed 2,204,369,090 won. All four items, including sales proceeds, total sales amount, and total purchase amount, were each inflated by exactly 10 times while keeping the same significant figures, and the loss rate remained -78.7%.
In other words, one zero was simply added to the end of every amount. The screen layout, item names, arrangement, and negative-sign format were also identical to the original Toss Securities app screen.
This kind of across-the-board 10-fold manipulation is a way to defeat verification of the screen itself. If the same multiplier is applied to every item, the loss rate and the mathematical relationships between items remain exactly the same as in the original, making it difficult to spot any arithmetic inconsistency from the numbers alone.
Unlike partial edits, which are exposed by calculation errors, this kind of manipulation, in which the digits are simply scaled up across the board, only revealed itself after the original screen was obtained and the two versions were compared side by side.
The altered post claims the investor "bought as soon as it was launched," but if the person had bought at the listing price of 23,450 won and held it until the post date, the loss rate would have been only in the high 60% range. To reach the displayed 78.7% loss, the selling price would have had to be around 5,000 won, but this ETF had never fallen to that level by the time the post was written.
The 78.7% figure matches the actual loss rate of the original poster, who bought near the late-June peak in the 37,000-won range. In the manipulation process, only the amount was inflated while the loss rate was kept unchanged, leaving it inconsistent with the fabricated purchase timing.
The sequence of the two posts is also clear. The original was posted in the Toss Securities community at around 11:33 a.m. on the 29th of last month, with the photo taken at 11:41 a.m. and cross-checked by a third-party capture immediately after posting. The altered post was uploaded to Carrot the next morning, on the 30th.
 
The original poster also confirmed the theft directly. At around 7 p.m. on the 30th of last month, when the manipulated post was spreading, he wrote on the Toss Securities community, "The loss rate and loss amount looked so familiar that I checked, and they had added a zero to the photo I posted yesterday."
The altered version was created and circulated in less than a day after the original was uploaded, but even after receiving a tip that identified the posting time, this newspaper needed more than five hours to find the original. The Toss Securities stock community has no nickname search or date-by-date navigation, leaving users with no choice but to scroll back through tens of thousands of posts. Without a tip, it is effectively impossible for ordinary users to verify whether a screenshot is authentic.
Although this kind of sophisticated manipulation is difficult for individuals to detect, there are at least some warning signs. In this case, one clue was that the displayed per-share price was at a level that did not exist in the actual price history.
Also, when a loss verification post involving an unusually large amount such as 2.2 billion won includes political expressions like "I invested because I trusted this government," it is worth considering the possibility that the post was manipulated to shape public opinion rather than to describe a real loss.
Still, because even this kind of verification takes considerable effort, observers say the first step is to avoid treating "account verification screenshots" as verified information.
This newspaper previously reported the controversy over the authenticity of the post when it first covered the story on the 30th of last month. Based on the latest verification, we are correcting that report.

[email protected] Sung Min-seo Reporter