SEOUL — The chat logs I read over as I searched for the name of just one teenage girl were incessant: “Does anyone still have her video? I want to watch it again. I heard she transferred to a school in [city].” “Hasn’t she taken her own life yet? How does she live after something like this happened? Every man in the country must know who she is by now.” “It used to be all over porn sites. Hearing her name again turns me on.” “So, today’s video is hers, right? What turns me on most is knowing that this destroyed her life.”
I found the logs while investigating South Korea’s Telegram deepfake sex abuse crisis , after the scandal became public in August 2024. A newspaper, The Hankyoreh, reported that a Telegram channel with around 227,000 participants allowed users to upload photos of women they knew and generate illegal synthetic sexual images within seconds.
Now, in May this year — nearly two years later — in a separate case, a report about a man, known as Mr. A, who had recorded hundreds of nonconsensual videos and photos of his girlfriend being sexually assaulted while she was incapacitated, has also sparked public outrage. It is clear that the digital sexual violence crisis in South Korea has only gotten worse, but also that South Korea is not alone. UN Women warned last year that digital violence is intensifying globally, and nearly half the world’s women and girls still lack legal protection from online abuse.
The girl in the chat logs was just one of the victims I encountered. As I accessed some of these Telegram spaces undercover, along with activists who were posing as male users, I found many more cases involving women and girls being targeted in similar ways. An image of Kim Nok-wan, center, the leader of a Telegram-based sex crime ring, is shown during a news program in Seoul on Nov. 24, 2025. The words on screen read: “Court sentences Kim Nok-wan to life imprisonment for sexual exploitation, production and distribution.” (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) We realized that the abuse began with the very conditions required to enter the chatrooms. To gain access, users had to provide the administrator with a photograph of a woman they knew, along with her age, occupation and place of residence. They also had to invent a plausible sexualized story about her, describing who she is, then adding vulgar descriptors like, “She is a notorious slut in the neighborhood who sleeps around with men.”
Across the chatrooms, the pattern was strikingly similar. A woman or girl who had once led an ordinary life could become the target of a coordinated campaign by men who threatened her and eventually forced her to film sexually exploitative videos. Male acquaintances, or men who had obtained her personal information, would share her photos, social media accounts, phone number, school or other identifying details in messaging apps. Others in the chatroom would then harass her through social media and phone. If a frightened or isolated woman sent even one explicit video in response to their demands, she was trapped. That single video could become leverage for further threats, sexual coercion and escalating exploitation. Her name might then circulate for years across Telegram chatrooms and manosphere communities — online spaces associated with misogyny, incel culture and anti-feminism.
At the time, many Koreans were horrified to learn that these were not isolated incidents, but part of a nationwide pattern. According to The Hankyoreh’s follow-up report in September 2024, folders in the Telegram channels where these digital sex crimes took place were named after schools and regions across the country. A crowdsourced Telegram deepfake victim map later showed how widely the abuse had spread. The digital sexual violence crisis in South Korea has only gotten worse. Choi Seo-hee, the head of ReSET, an organization working to eradicate digital sex crimes, recalled seeing the names of schools and neighborhoods circulating online. “The subway station toilet near my university, the high school I attended and the area where I lived were all on the list,” she told Truthdig. “That means I could have been a victim at least three times.”
Although South Korea amended its sexual crimes law in September 2024 to criminalize the possession, purchase, storage and viewing of deepfake sexual content, the limits of the law were immediately clear. It failed to keep pace with the severity and speed of the abuse. For instance, Nolja, originally one of the largest sexual exploitation communities for sharing illegally filmed, intimate footage of former or current girlfriends and spouses, had 100,000 daily users in 2025. This was a 60% increase since the passing of the law, and the community has now become controversial for the latest type of abuse: the misuse of generative artificial intelligence tools, including Google Nano Banana, to display nude figurine-style images of women.
Perpetrators constantly demand “new releases” and never stop searching for new victims. Their targets have expanded from well-known women to ordinary women in their lives. Sexually exploitative material is uploaded alongside women’s personal details, allowing hundreds of thousands of users to rate, critique and mock them. Users evade government crackdowns and site-blocking by sharing prompts that bypass the filters for preventing the production of sexually exploitative material. They create separate rooms accessible only to high-ranking members, and regularly change domain names. South Korea transitions from the ‘Republic of Spycams’ to AI misogyny
Digital sexual abuse in South Korea dates back to the late 1990s. With the development of micro-camera technology, hidden camera crimes began to emerge. These involved the covert filming of people in public places, with the footage primarily distributed through online bulletin boards and peer-to-peer file-sharing sites.
“Molka,” a shortened form of the Korean word for a hidden camera, refers both to the act of filming another person’s body without consent — in toilets, changing rooms, streets, hotels or private bedrooms — and to the resulting material. Documentary maker Choi Yeon-jeong, creator of “Watch — Molka,” which explains South Korea’s illegal filming crisis, told Truthdig that many Korean women live with the fear that they may have been filmed without consent. “I have likely been the victim of illegal filming without even realizing it.” “As a Korean woman, I believe I have likely been the victim of illegal filming without even realizing it,” she said. “There is little I can do except hope there are no cameras whenever I use a public toilet.”
From the mid-2000s, large-scale illegal sites such as Soranet industrialized the abuse. Launched in 1999, Soranet repackaged nonconsensually filmed footage of ordinary women as so-called “Korean-made porn” — a euphemism that helped disguise sexual abuse material as pornography. The site was finally shut down in 2016, largely because of the efforts of Digital Sexual Crime Out (DSO), a small group of Korean women activists who monitored Soranet in real time. They collected evidence and reported the site’s activities to law enforcement, prompting an international investigation into its overseas servers. As a result of DSO’s work, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency conducted an international joint investigation and shut down key overseas servers.
Nevertheless, from the mid-2010s digital sexual crimes continued to evolve, moving into closed messaging platforms such as Telegram and Discord, as well as the dark web. Perpetrators produced and distributed sexual exploitation material while evading police investigations. As the number of participants grew, the abuse escalated into organized crime.
The most notorious case was the Telegram “Nth Room” incident, which came to light in 2019. Vulnerable women and girls were blackmailed into producing material, which was then distributed and sold. The name derives from the multiple secret Telegram chatrooms created. In chatrooms with hundreds of thousands of members, participants consumed sexual exploitation material while demanding ever more extreme content. A related scandal, known as the webhard cartel — a network of South Korean file-storage and download platforms where companies that uploaded, filtered and deleted footage were later found to be tied to the same corporate owner — saw victims paying to remove material.
Now, in the 2020s, crimes using AI technology to humiliate female acquaintances, have surged. Men who had previously participated in chatrooms have returned as more active individual producers of sexual exploitation material, aided by advanced technology. The abuse becomes collective sexual violence. They use AI deepfake technology to superimpose ordinary photos of people known to the perpetrator — rather than celebrities — onto nude images or pornography, and then they distribute them without consent. Perpetrators also routinely include women’s personal information, make sexually degrading remarks and incite other men in group chats to humiliate the victim. In this way, the abuse becomes collective sexual violence. The abuse has also spread through social media, and is being practiced by teenagers and people in their 20s, becoming a form of everyday terror within peer groups. In particular, cases targeting girls in abusers’ classes and female teachers have risen sharply — increasing thirty-fold from 2022 to 2024. How does this hell keep repeating?
While South Korea’s legal system has struggled to keep pace with digital sexual violence, for many victims it has completely failed to show up. Public mobilization around the recent case of Mr. A, who recorded hundreds of sexual assault videos and photos, intensified earlier this year as the legal system appeared to let him get away with the crimes. The alleged assault and nonconsensual recording occurred in 2020, but the court outcome only came recently. The case is regarded as one of the worst examples of overlapping intimate-partner violence, drug-facilitated sexual assault and illegal filming, and in March this year, over just three days, 11,028 members of the public signed a petition calling for a thorough investigation and punishment for Mr. A. The Women’s Party, South Korea’s first feminist political party, argued in the petition that the case was a rare example in which allegations of drug-facilitated sexual assault and digital sexual violence were supported by extensive evidence. Yet on May 28, the Constitutional Court dismissed victim Kim Ji-hyun’s (a pseudonym) complaint seeking to overturn court rulings that had upheld the prosecutors’ decision not to indict Mr. A on sexual assault and nonconsensual recording charges. In response, the Women’s Party held a press conference on June 8 where it condemned the dismissal as a failure to protect sexual violence victims. Kim Ji-hyun’s case shows how much the justice system can minimize even extreme abuse. Investigators found 440 videos and photos of her on Mr. A’s phone that showed her being sexually assaulted while incapacitated, and external experts concluded she was likely drugged. Yet prosecutors declined to indict the perpetrator with sexual assault or illegal filming, citing the absence of drugs in a hair test that was conducted two months later. Hair testing for date rape drugs can sometimes be useful, but results can be less reliable for single drug use (as opposed to detecting ongoing drug use) and are subject to variables like the exact drug used, hair type, growth rate and contamination (like dye). Mr. A is now only being tried for unauthorized access to Kim’s social media account. Kim Ji-hyun’s case shows how much the justice system can minimize even extreme abuse. “In South Korea, women are targeted [by men] for illegal filming regardless of time or place — through home cameras, operating-room CCTV, toilets and on the streets — and the footage is distributed at an alarming speed,” Yoo Ji-hye, who ran as the Women’s Party’s candidate for Seoul mayor in June 3 local elections, told Truthdig.
The scale of sites such as Yadong Korea, an illegal sexual exploitation site, shows why that fear persists. Reported by the Women’s Party in 2025, Yadong Korea recorded 56.7 million monthly visits — more than the country’s population. The site now appears to have been shut down, but similar platforms continue to reappear under new names and domains.
Concerns continue to be raised over lenient sentencing by the judiciary and the lack of resources in law enforcement. Even after the Nth Room scandal, 61.5% of digital sex crime verdicts between April and August 2021 resulted in suspended sentences, and more than 1,800 cases were handled through summary indictments that ended in fines. In the three years after the Nth Room case, the number of dedicated digital sex crime investigators across provincial police agencies nationwide increased by only 10 . In cases of AI-enabled deepfake sexual violence, offenses have sometimes been treated lightly as violations of personal information law or as insults, rather than being classified as sex crimes.
Experts I talked to pointed out that digital sex crimes have evolved beyond mere entertainment into a massive industry worth multitrillion Korean won. For that reason, they argue, no fundamental solution can be achieved through post-incident deletion support or website-blocking alone. “The biggest reason this tragedy keeps repeating is the negligence of the legislative, judicial and administrative branches, which dismiss this issue as ‘a problem solely for women’ and fail to offer genuine solutions,” Park Ji-hyun told Truthdig. She is a former interim leader of the Democratic Party of Korea and a member of Tracking Team Spark, which exposed the Telegram Nth Room case and made a decisive contribution to unraveling it. Park Ji-hyun, former interim leader of the Democratic Party of Korea. (JiHye Jeong) Park said that support for removing digital sexual violence content is necessary, but complete deletion is virtually impossible. “That is why we must devote more legislative and educational effort to preventing these crimes before they occur.”
Yoon Ji-sun, a feminist philosopher and author of “Korean Gender War,” said networks of male perpetrators are often run as collective games or challenges, turning digital sexual exploitation into “safe entertainment that comes with little cost for perpetrators.”
“State authorities and the judicial system that should be severing this criminal ecosystem instead sustain this hellish landscape through structural neglect and tacit approval,” she told Truthdig. Park welcomed the government’s new Integrated Support Group for Victims of Digital Sex Crimes, a cross-agency task force that aims to dismantle infrastructure like revenue models and distribution routes of online sex crimes that was launched last month. However, she questioned its effectiveness, noting that the body responsible for blocking digital sex crime material had been virtually inactive for nearly a year and that one report found that 72% of sites that were supposedly blocked were still accessible.
“My life is not your porn”: Women’s resistance has an impact
In light of such institutional impunity, women have repeatedly been forced to protect themselves — in the streets, online and in the courts. The Uncomfortable Courage protests — also called the My Life Is Not Your Porn protests — against biased investigations into illegal filming, held six times across Seoul between May and December 2018, drew more than 300,000 participants. They were the largest demonstrations in the history of South Korea’s women’s movement. Six years later, when the deepfake sexual violence crisis erupted, women again gathered in black to demand severe punishment for deepfake sexual exploitation. They lamented that despite hundreds of thousands of women having demanded action years earlier, the state’s failure to produce an institutional solution had allowed the crime to evolve into a new technological form. Women’s persistence forced the system to act. Realizing that they could not rely on the authorities, women infiltrated Telegram chatrooms themselves, gathered evidence of illegal AI-generated sexual exploitation material and reported it to the media and investigative agencies. Until then, police had often shifted the burden of securing investigative leads onto victims, saying that Telegram was difficult to trace. In many cases, they failed to identify perpetrators and closed investigations without referring the cases for prosecution.
In some cases, however, the women’s persistence forced the system to act. In one recent case based at Seoul National University, where graduates created and distributed deepfake sexual images of 61 women, including 12 alumni, women secured a 10-year prison sentence for the main perpetrator. For years, the victims refused to let the case disappear, women lawyers fought earlier decisions by police and prosecutors not to pursue it, and Won Eun-ji, an activist from Tracking Team Spark, helped force the case back into public and legal view, finally securing victory in October 2024.
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