Provided herein may be a memory system and a method of operating the same. The memory system may include a memory device configured to include a plurality of memory blocks and copy data from victim blocks among the plurality of memory blocks into a target memory block during a garbage collection operation, and a memory controller configured to control the memory device to perform the garbage collection operation, and configured to control the memory device, during the garbage collection operation, to erase the data stored in the victim blocks using a multi-erase method.