Manner Temperature (매너온도, maeneo ondo, literally “manner temperature”) is the built-in trust score on Danggeun Market (당근마켓, Danggeun Maket, short for “the market near you”). Every new account starts at exactly 36.5°C — Korea’s average human body temperature — and climbs toward a 99°C ceiling as you trade. It reads like a safety rating. It isn’t quite one, and the app’s own overseas team agreed.
I found that out the hard way. A coworker was about to hand over ₩380,000 for a used stroller and asked whether a 42.7° seller rating meant she could trust the person. I told her yes, with more confidence than someone who literally builds internal scoring systems for a bank had any business having. Then I went looking for the underlying methodology to back myself up, and ran into something I hadn’t expected: when Danggeun Market’s parent company took the app overseas as Karrot, it threw out the entire 36.5° concept.
Not tweaked it.
Deleted it.
What Does Manner Temperature Actually Measure?
The number climbs from a composite score, not a single star rating — trade completions after a chat, how quickly you respond to messages, and specific praise keywords other users attach to you (“responded promptly,” “item as described”). It has nothing to do with identity checks, item authenticity, or whether money changed hands safely. That gap is the whole point of this piece, so it’s worth laying out plainly before going further.
| Counts Toward the Score | Has No Effect On It |
|---|---|
| Completing a trade after messaging | Whether the item is authentic or as-described |
| How fast you reply in chat | Photos matching the real condition of the item |
| Praise keywords left by trade partners | Whether payment happened safely, on- or off-app |
| Consistency across many trades over time | Identity verification or criminal history |
My own score sits at 58.3°C after roughly a dozen trades over two years — mostly kids’ furniture and one very reluctantly sold monitor. That number tells a buyer I show up and respond to messages. It tells them nothing about whether the crib I sold had a recall notice on it, because Danggeun Market has no field for that at all. A high Manner Temperature is a communication record, not a background check, and the confusion between the two is exactly what got me in trouble with my coworker.
Why Did Karrot Drop the 36.5° Idea Overseas?
When the same company launched its app in North America, Canada, Japan, and the UK under the name Karrot (당근, Danggeun, literally “carrot” — the app’s own English shorthand for itself), it replaced 36.5° with a plain “Karrot Score” that starts everyone at 30 points. According to the company’s own developer blog, user interviews turned up the reason: most non-Korean users didn’t recognize 36.5 as a body temperature reference at all. Some assumed it referred to local weather.
That detail changed how I read the Korean version. If the team that built the metric didn’t trust it to survive translation, the number was never really doing safety work — it was doing branding work. 36.5° sounds warm, human, trustworthy, in a culture where the reference is instantly legible. Outside that culture, the same digits are just noise, so the company swapped them for something that reads as a neutral point total instead of a metaphor. The score itself didn’t get smarter. It got renamed for an audience that couldn’t hear the pun.
How Bad Is Secondhand Fraud in Korea Right Now?
It’s getting worse, and the trend line is steep. Police-reported secondhand-trading fraud cases jumped from 78,320 in 2023 to over 100,000 in 2024 — a 28% year-over-year increase in case count — while total damages climbed far faster, from ₩137.3 billion to ₩334 billion, more than doubling (up 143%) over the same stretch. In 2025 alone, cases hit roughly 120,000 (119,741) with ₩874.1 billion in damages — and the real five-year (2021–2025) cumulative total is closer to ₩1.72 trillion across roughly 462,000 cases.
| Year | Reported Fraud Cases | Total Damages |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 78,320 | ₩137.3 billion |
| 2024 | 100,000+ | ₩334 billion |
| 2025 | 119,741 | ₩874.1 billion |
| 5-year cumulative (2021–2025) | ~462,000 | ₩1.72 trillion |
None of that growth shows up anywhere near a seller’s Manner Temperature. A scammer who never completes a trade, or who trades small items honestly to build up a number before running one big scam, looks identical to a careful neighbor on the metric alone. The score simply wasn’t designed to catch a rising fraud curve — it was designed before that curve existed, back when the app’s biggest risk was flakiness, not theft.
What Is a Safe Transaction Zone, and How Do You Use One?
A safe transaction zone (안심거래존, ansim georae jon, literally “secure trade zone”) is a CCTV-monitored meeting spot set up directly in front of a police station or community center for exactly this kind of trade. The first five zones piloted at Ansan Sangnok Police Station in August 2022, and the model has kept spreading — Seocho-gu added three more at community centers in 2023, and most metropolitan police stations now mark one out with signage and a camera pointed at the handoff spot.
Using one is close to anticlimactic: you agree on a meeting point that happens to be the marked zone instead of a subway exit or apartment lobby, you trade in view of the camera, and you leave. No app, no booking, no fee. The only friction is that you have to know the zone exists and go looking for its location near your neighborhood police substation before you need it, not after — which is exactly the kind of prevention nobody’s Manner Temperature will ever prompt you to do.
How Does a “Free” App Turn Into a ₩270 Billion Business?
Listings and giveaways cost nothing, so the money comes from somewhere else entirely: hyperlocal advertising built on top of a marketplace that already knows exactly where you live. In its 2025 consolidated results, Danggeun/Karrot posted ₩270.7 billion in revenue, up 43% year over year, with operating profit of ₩14.6 billion — a 481% jump from the year before. That came on the back of 190 million secondhand transactions, 2.65 million local Biz Profiles for neighborhood shops, and a 37% rise in the number of paying advertisers.
The Manner Temperature system isn’t incidental to that business — it’s part of what keeps people opening the app daily instead of only when they have something to sell. A score that rises with every friendly interaction turns a one-off transaction tool into something closer to a habit, and my own read on it — not something Danggeun has ever confirmed — is that habits, not one-off transactions, are what an ad business actually sells to local shops. Seen that way, the temperature metaphor was never really about protecting buyers. It was about making the app feel warm enough to keep opening.
What I’d Actually Tell a New Expat Before Their First Karrot Trade
Check the number, because ignoring it completely would be its own kind of overcorrection — a 90°C seller with two hundred trades behind them is a genuinely different risk than a fresh 36.5° account with zero. But stop treating it as a safety verdict. For anything over roughly ₩100,000 — strollers, laptops, anything my ISTJ brain would file under “a real trade” rather than pocket change — I now default to meeting near a marked safe transaction zone instead of wherever the other person suggests, not because I distrust the specific stranger in the chat, but because a CCTV camera doesn’t care what temperature either of us is running.
One more thing worth knowing before your first trade: the app’s neighborhood-verification step (동네인증, dongne injeung, literally “neighborhood certification”) uses GPS to lock your listings to a radius of roughly 2 to 6 kilometers, depending on how dense the neighborhood is, and asks you to re-verify periodically. When we moved apartments, the app quietly cut me off from my old neighborhood’s listings within about a day of the GPS ping showing a new address, and re-verifying meant physically standing inside the new radius and waiting for the app to catch up. That same mechanic has become its own scam vector — reports describe strangers offering to “verify a neighborhood” for a new user and walking off with their account instead. The lesson isn’t to distrust the app. It’s to remember that every trust mechanic on Danggeun Market, including the one glowing at 36.5°, was built to solve a specific, narrower problem than the one you’re actually worried about.