Two years after escaping SM Entertainment, Chen, Baekhyun, and Xiumin are back in court this time chasing an agency boss accused of a 30 billion won fraud who is too detained to even answer the summons.
For the three members of EXO known collectively as CBX, freedom has become a moving target. On the morning of September 7, a Seoul courtroom convened to hear their plea to be released from an exclusive contract and the person they’re suing didn’t show up. Not out of defiance, but because she couldn’t: CEO Cha Ga-won is sitting in detention, indicted on a fraud scheme that prosecutors value at nearly 30 billion won. Her lawyers couldn’t be reached either. The judge listened, noted the silence on the other side, and closed the hearing the same day.
It was, in its own quiet way, one of the most surreal scenes in recent K-pop legal history: an agency being sued into oblivion, with no one on the other side of the table.
The Suit: A Contract With No One to Enforce It
Chen (Kim Jong-dae), Baekhyun (Byun Baek-hyun), and Xiumin (Kim Min-seok) filed for an injunction to suspend the validity of their exclusive contracts with INB100, alongside a separate lawsuit seeking confirmation that the contract no longer exists. The Seoul Central District Court’s Civil Agreement Division 50, presided over by Chief Judge Lee Sang-hoon, heard the injunction petition on September 7.
The trio’s grievance is one the K-pop world has heard before: unpaid settlements. Back in April, CBX notified Cha’s camp that they were terminating the contract over unsettled payments and other alleged breaches, demanding answers. When those answers never came and when contact with Cha’s side went dark entirely they escalated to the courts last month. At the hearing, their legal representative put it bluntly: Cha has been detained and is unreachable. When the bench asked whether even her attorneys could be contacted, the answer was the same. No.
How CBX Ended Up Here Twice
To understand why this stings, you have to rewind. CBX didn’t stumble into a bad agency by accident they left one of the most powerful companies in K-pop to escape exactly this kind of dispute.
In 2023 and 2024, Chen, Baekhyun, and Xiumin waged a very public battle against SM Entertainment, the industry titan that debuted EXO in 2012. The three accused SM of opaque accounting, refusing to hand over settlement records, and locking them into contract terms stretching as far as 2028 — the kind of arrangement Korean media and fans reflexively label a “slave contract.” SM fired back, insisting the contracts remained valid and that CBX had agreed to pay 10 percent of revenue from their independent activities. It was messy, litigated in public, and ultimately resolved with the members carving out room to operate on their own terms.
That independence took physical form in INB100 the label Baekhyun founded (initially preceded by his performance venture One Signature), which Chen and Xiumin joined in early 2024. For a moment, it looked like the storybook ending: three artists who’d fought for autonomy, running their own house.
Then the house got bought.
The Empire That Rose and Fell in Two Years
Enter Cha Ga-won, a former real estate developer and one-time chairman of the Piac Group, who decided to build a K-pop empire at breakneck speed. In 2023 she co-founded One Hundred Label with singer-producer MC Mong, leveraging her real estate wealth reportedly using a luxury Hannam-dong residence as collateral for a loan of around 10 billion won to bankroll the venture.
What followed was one of the fastest consolidations the industry had ever seen. One Hundred absorbed MC Mong’s Big Planet Made Entertainment (home to Lee Seung-gi, SHINee’s Taemin, and comedian Lee Soo-geun) and Million Market. In 2024, it swallowed Baekhyun’s INB100 pulling Chen and Xiumin along with it and poached boy group The Boyz from IST Entertainment. In roughly 24 months, a real estate mogul with no entertainment background had assembled a multi-label conglomerate.
And then it imploded just as fast. A tabloid scandal engulfed one of The Boyz’s members in mid-2025. Cha removed MC Mong from his duties, later alleging he was tied to prostitution; MC Mong’s exit gutted the roster he had personally built. A 12 billion won loan-repayment lawsuit between the two co-founders spilled into public view, complete with allegations of a years-long romantic relationship that Cha denied, claiming the whole affair was fabricated as part of a hostile takeover attempt against her company.
By early 2026, the artists began fleeing en masse. Nine members of The Boyz, Lee Mu-jin, Lee Seung-gi, Viviz, Baekho, Taemin and CBX all moved to sever ties, nearly all citing the same complaint: unpaid settlements and withheld accounting. Across three labels, reportedly only one artist remained.
The Fraud Case Casting a Shadow Over Everything
The reason Cha couldn’t attend her own hearing is the story’s darkest turn. In August 2026, she was indicted and detained on charges of fraud totaling roughly 30 billion won ($22 million). Prosecutors allege she pitched a business built on her artists’ intellectual property to a company called Knowmerce (also romanized Nomus/Nomos), signed a contract, collected 24.2 billion won in advance payments — and then never delivered the project. The total estimated damage runs to around 29.4 billion won. Her first trial is scheduled for October 13.
Cha has denied the allegations, framing the entire case as ammunition in a hostile M&A campaign against One Hundred. But the courts saw enough risk of evidence tampering to keep her detained which is precisely why CBX now find themselves suing an agency whose leadership is, functionally, absent.
What This Means for CBX and for K-Pop
Here’s the quiet irony worth sitting with: the very transparency CBX demanded from SM Entertainment is the same thing they’re now demanding from the agency they left SM to build. The through-line of their entire post-EXO career has been a single, stubborn insistence show us the money, and honor the deal. Twice now, the industry has failed them on exactly that point.
For the members, the immediate stakes are practical. An injunction, if granted, would free them to work without INB100’s contractual claim hanging over their heads critical for solo careers that have been thriving in parallel (Baekhyun’s solo releases and touring, Chen’s ballad-driven catalog, Xiumin’s own musical output). With Cha detained and her legal team unreachable, the court has little to weigh on the opposing side, which may well work in CBX’s favor.
But the larger takeaway lands on the industry itself. Cha Ga-won’s story is a cautionary tale about capital rushing into K-pop without the infrastructure or scruples to sustain it. When outside money treats artists as IP to be leveraged rather than talent to be developed, the collapse tends to be spectacular. CBX have now lived through two versions of that lesson. The question that lingers isn’t whether they’ll win this round with an empty chair across the courtroom, they very likely will. It’s whether the third agency they trust with their careers will finally be the one that keeps its promises.