Coupang, an e-commerce giant used by 14 million South Korean citizens, is showing an unprecedented "two-faced" stance depending on national borders. When facing legitimate legal regulations from the South Korean government, it applied full-scale pressure by mobilizing US political circles, demanding, "Do not discriminate against American companies." However, when a massive class-action lawsuit broke out in a US court threatening tens of billions of won in liability, it staged a farce by pleading, "We are a Korean company that uses the Korean language, so please dismiss the trial." Outrage is growing among South Korean consumers over Coupang’s extreme "cherry-picking" double standard—pocketing profits through its US headquarters while shifting judicial responsibility to South Korea.
Recently, the US House Judiciary Committee published an official report stating that the South Korean government is systematically discriminating against and attacking American-owned companies, including Coupang. US lawmakers even sent letters to the South Korean government warning against discriminating against Coupang. Behind this unusual pressure from US political circles was Coupang’s massive capital power.
It was revealed that Coupang’s US parent company, 'Coupang Inc.,' spent approximately 15.8 billion KRW on large-scale lobbying targeting the White House, the Department of Commerce, and the House of Representatives over the four years following its listing on the New York Stock Exchange. In the second quarter of this year alone, it poured massive funds into US lobbying, paying $250,000 to a Trump-affiliated lobbying firm. Whenever the South Korean government wielded regulations to protect domestic consumers and workers, Coupang used the US political arena as leverage to pressure the South Korean government, using the stance of "We are a proud American company" as a shield.
However, the confidence of claiming to be an "American company" vanished without a trace at the threshold of the US court. Recently, as a $5 million (approx. 7.3 billion KRW) class-action lawsuit by shareholders and consumers regarding a large-scale personal information leak case gained momentum in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Coupang Inc. suddenly reversed its stance.
In a motion to dismiss submitted to the court, Coupang’s legal team claimed, "Coupang’s services are provided almost exclusively in Korean, and deliveries are only possible to Korean addresses," arguing that "the actual party involved is the Korean entity, so the US court has no jurisdiction." After pleading with the US government and Congress to protect it from South Korean government regulations on the grounds of being an American company, it flipped its position when faced with compensation liability in a US court, virtually claiming to be a Korean company to avoid US jurisdiction.
Coupang’s moral hazard of arbitrarily altering its nationality was plainly proven in the largest personal information leak incident in South Korean history. According to an investigation by the Personal Information Protection Commission, Coupang leaked personal information belonging to a staggering 37.55 million members and non-members, resulting in an unprecedented fine of 624.6 billion KRW. Despite having about 14 million paying 'WOW' members, personal data equivalent to the entire economically active population of South Korea was exposed due to Coupang's total security insensitivity.
The most serious issue is that information belonging to at least 4.33 million pure non-members who had never even signed up was included. Delivery address books containing the names, addresses, and contact details of parents and acquaintances registered by users for gifts or deliveries were exposed entirely. Furthermore, information of former members who had deleted their accounts was kept without being destroyed even after the legal retention period had passed. Rather than stemming from sophisticated external hacking, this incident resulted from internal management negligence—leaving core signing keys for authentication tokens in plain text—which effectively opened a high-speed data highway for a hacker to conduct 140 million brute-force queries.
Such behavior is a clear judicial contradiction and a deception of the South Korean public. Coupang’s headquarters has disclosed Coupang Korea as its major subsidiary and has exercised substantial control by dispatching US headquarters executives as representatives of the Korean entity whenever risks arose. It claims to be "one body" when controlling and making money, but draws the line as "strangers" when taking legal responsibility.
Ultimately, by Coupang’s logic, the personal information of 37.55 million people and South Korean consumers are merely excuses and human shields to dodge the US headquarters' legal risks. Facing Coupang's double-faced reality—pleading South Korean consumers as an excuse in US courts while hiding behind US politics as an American company in front of the South Korean government—it is now time for South Korean consumers and regulatory authorities to hold it strictly and dispassionately accountable under the law.
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