The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) of South Korea is significantly enhancing its capabilities to combat cryptocurrency market manipulation through major upgrades to its artificial intelligence (AI) surveillance systems. The financial watchdog has allocated a budget to acquire an additional Nvidia H100 GPU unit, with installation planned for the second quarter of 2024, to bolster its existing AI framework.
This new hardware will support the VISTA investigation platform, which was launched in 2024 and upgraded with two H100 units last year. The enhanced system employs structured grid searches to analyze trading data, reviewing each sub-period within transaction timelines to identify manipulation windows that previously required manual review. Internal testing has shown the AI can detect all previously confirmed manipulation cases and even flag hidden intervals missed by traditional analysis.
The FSS is also introducing new functions to VISTA focused on account-level analysis. The platform will now track suspicious clusters of accounts linked to coordinated trading schemes across multiple exchanges, enabling faster enforcement decisions. Furthermore, the regulator plans to develop a large language model (LLM) to classify harmful communications tied to unfair trading, analyzing messages to connect communication patterns with trading behavior.
The agency is reviewing the creation of a separate, dedicated AI network for continuous real-time market monitoring. This system would identify abrupt price movements and assess technical risks across exchanges, aiming to verify unusual activity before daily data reports are processed, thereby shortening response times.
This aggressive technological push is driven by a sharp and sustained increase in suspicious activity reports. Between January and August 2025 alone, providers filed 36,684 reports, a figure that already exceeds the combined totals for all of 2023 and 2024. Reported cases have climbed steadily from 199 in 2021, to 10,797 in 2022, 16,076 in 2023, and 19,658 in 2024. Additionally, customs authorities have referred crypto-linked cases worth approximately 9.56 trillion won (about $7.2 billion) to prosecutors since 2021, with about 8.62 trillion won related to illegal cross-border transfer schemes using crypto to bypass banking systems.
The FSS states these upgrades are part of its long-term enforcement roadmap, aimed at maintaining stable supervision as the virtual asset ecosystem evolves and market complexity grows.
