SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - Forty years of savings. Gone.
A leveraged bet on SK hynix. A 78.7 percent loss. Some 2.2 billion won ($1.5 million) wiped out.
A brokerage screenshot appeared to prove every painful detail.
The post, uploaded to local community platform Danggeun on July 30, claimed an investor had gone bankrupt after pouring four decades of savings into a leveraged exchange-traded fund tied to SK hynix.
It was devastating…except that it was also fake.
The image was doctored. It had been copied from a real post uploaded a day earlier to an investment community run by Toss Securities. Someone multiplied the purchase, sale and loss amounts by 10 while leaving the 78.7 percent loss rate unchanged.
“The numbers looked familiar, so I checked again. Someone had added a zero to the image I posted,” the original investor said after the manipulated version began circulating.
The claim also failed to match the ETF’s trading history.
The poster said the investment had been made shortly after the product’s launch. But an investor who bought at the listing price of 23,450 won and held until the date of the post would have lost about 60 percent. A 78.7 percent decline would have required the ETF to fall to around 5,000 won, a level it had never reached.
The fabricated loss nevertheless spread as Korean retail investors were already nursing heavy losses after a sharp reversal in semiconductor and AI stocks.
From FOMO to ‘dishwashing’
During the rally, fear of missing out drew investors into stocks that had already surged.
After the reversal, another term returned to Korean investment communities: seolgeoji, or “dishwashing.”
The slang refers to late investors left with losses after earlier buyers sell at high prices.
The expression became widespread during Korea’s 2020–2021 housing boom, when younger buyers borrowed heavily to buy homes near the top of the market.
It has now moved into stocks.
A recent online post titled “People in their 20s and 30s got stuck doing the dishes in real estate, and now stocks too” linked the expression to young investors who borrowed to buy shares and suffered losses.
Other posts complained that investors who entered because of FOMO had been left “doing the dishes.”
Korean retail investors are commonly called “ants,” reflecting their large numbers and relatively small individual holdings.
Social media and the herd
Research suggests online investment communities can reinforce herd behavior among retail investors.
A 2022 study by researchers at Chosun University examined posts on Naver Finance discussion boards and trading data for 971 KOSPI- and KOSDAQ-listed companies between 2018 and 2021.
Published in Frontiers in Physics, the study found that higher social-media activity was associated with stronger herding among retail investors. The relationship became more pronounced after the COVID-19 pandemic.
A 2025 study by Konkuk University researcher Hohyun Kim, published in Finance Research Letters, also found that investors who used social media for investment information tended to have shorter investment horizons.
The effect was stronger among younger investors and those who were more confident in their investment knowledge.
Neither study establishes that online posts directly cause investors to buy or sell.
But they show how social media can reinforce two forces already familiar in markets: following the crowd and chasing short-term returns.
The fake SK hynix screenshot shows another side of the same phenomenon.
A real loss of 220.4 million won was already substantial. By adding a zero, someone turned it into a far more dramatic story of bankruptcy and financial ruin.
Profits and losses are both widely shared in Korean investment communities.
During rallies, screenshots of large gains can fuel FOMO. During selloffs, images of large losses can amplify fear and regret.
Financial authorities have also warned that online communities, social media and video platforms can be used for unfair trading, including cases in which investors buy shares before promoting them online and sell after others push up the price.
The altered SK hynix screenshot has not been linked to such a scheme.
But it illustrates how easily private investment results can be copied, manipulated and recirculated once they become online content.
The market loss was real.
The extra zero was not.
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