South Korean Police Raid Kakao Pay Over Alleged Illegal Cross-Border Transfer of Personal Data

South Korean mobile-payments giant Kakao Pay is suspected of transferring 54.2 billion pieces of personal data belonging to 40 million users to China’s Alipay without consent between 2018 and 2024. The case, which caused serious harm to user privacy, drew intense regulatory scrutiny. South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission fined the company 5.968 billion won in January 2025, followed by a 12.98 billion won penalty from the Financial Supervisory Service in February of that year.

Kakao Pay filed an administrative lawsuit with the Seoul Administrative Court to challenge the penalties but lost the case in June 2026. South Korean police then conducted a compulsory search of Kakao Pay’s headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, on July 6–7, seizing internal decision-making records and electronic hard drives. Police are investigating under the Credit Information Act and other laws to determine whether senior executives were internally involved in the allegedly unlawful decisions, and plan to summon people connected to the case.