How South Korea’s digital sex crime crisis is devastating the nation’s women

Seoul: When police called Park Yoon-ju* in February this year with their concerns she was a victim in a deepfake porn ring, she initially suspected it was a scam call.

Police told her they had uncovered dozens of doctored, sexually explicit images of her in a Telegram chatroom. She knew the man they were alleging was responsible, but she hadn’t spoken to him for more than a decade.

“In Korea there are so many scam calls, like voice phishing, so at first I was suspicious,” she says. “It only really hit when I saw the photos at the police station, and that was shocking.”

Park, a 31-year-old marketing professional, had met Choi Dong-won as a teenager when they were studying English in a church-run academy program in Seoul – a pathway program of sorts to a church-linked university in the United States. This masthead has given both of them pseudonyms to protect the victims’ identities.

Throughout 2013 and 2014, they sat in the same classroom. Occasionally, at lunchtime, the students would eat together, but otherwise Park and Choi were acquaintances, not friends.

But at some point in the years after their lives diverged, he stripped photos from her Instagram account and used AI to make them sexually explicit. He superimposed her face onto pornographic scenes and took explicit photos of himself with the images before sharing them on Telegram chat rooms.

There were other victims too, as many as 50, according to court documents. In total, Choi, a doctorate student, generated and shared more than 2000 deepfake images and videos over the course of several years, court documents reveal.

“It was unbelievable to hear that he had done something like this,” says Park, who recalls him being a well-liked student with a good sense of humour, who was generous with sharing study tips.

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Last month, Choi was sentenced to eight years’ jail and 80 hours of sexual violence education. The judge describing his offending as “heinous” and designed to “sexually insult and mock innocent victims”, causing them “significant mental distress, despair, and shame”.

His lawyers have indicated he will appeal.

Park is one of tens of thousands of digital sex crime victims in South Korea, which has been at the global forefront of an explosion of non-consensual deepfake pornography targeting women.

A 2023 report by US cybersecurity firm Security Hero found that South Korea accounted for 53 per cent of the world’s deepfake porn, with singers and actors most targeted.

Before the laws began catching up in 2020, victims were largely left to fend for themselves, and had to hunt down their own secretly recorded or deepfake videos and images, plead with websites to take them down, or pay private companies to help erase them, at once reliving their trauma and draining their savings.

Even with her perpetrator in jail, Park says the violation continues to affect her, as she grapples with the loss of control over the images that may still be circulating online. It has left her distrusting men, even strangers.

“These kinds of crimes have always existed. But I thought, at least the men I personally know wouldn’t do that,” Park says.

“Even when I just see a similar case in the news, society feels horrifying, disgusting, and it makes me angry.”

Her caseworker, Lee Kyoung-jin, says her team at a local digital sex crimes support centre is working with 20 other victims connected to the same case. The centre has supported more than 1000 people in cases involving online harms since 2021, about 85 per cent of them women, and is struggling to keep up with the influx of new cases.

“Each caseworker is currently handling about 70 victims in real time. When one case closes, new ones come in,” she says.

South Korea’s deepfake porn crisis

Choi’s offending was uncovered as part of a police investigation into the widespread distribution of deepfake pornography on Telegram, a messaging app that facilitates encrypted chat groups, which was at the centre of a crisis that swept through South Korea last year.

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It attracted international attention and revived heated debates about the role of South Korea’s deep gender divisions and patriarchal societal structures in fuelling the problem.

The scandal accelerated after May 2024, when police busted a deepfake porn ring run by graduates of the prestigious Seoul National University, targeting current and former students. Another ring was uncovered months later targeting a different campus, Inha University, which led police to Choi.

By the end of the year, Korean media investigations and social-media activists had helped expose the existence of Telegram networks targeting women and girls in 500 schools and universities. One channel had more than 220,000 participants.

The concept of “acquaintance humiliation” thrived in this network of chat rooms, dubbed “humiliation rooms”, in which perpetrators circulated degrading and sexually abusive images of women they knew, often only distantly.

Korean authorities cracked down last year, expanding laws to criminalise the production, distribution, viewing and storing of deepfake content, making it punishable by up to seven years in jail. A deepfake sexual crimes taskforce has been set up, assisting 1807 victims in the past year – a 128 per cent increase on the previous year – and 97 per cent of the victims are women.

South Korea has a history of online sexual violence targeting women, including the infamous Nth Room case, which saw women and minors coerced into producing sexually exploitative content that was then shared and sold in secret Telegram chat rooms between 2018 and 2020.

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Before the deepfake crisis took hold, the country had already been grappling with an epidemic of hidden spy camera – or molka – crime that was servicing online porn sites. In 2016, the government forced the closure of the notorious Soranet porn site, which had at least 1 million members and hosted thousands of spy camera and revenge porn videos.

“I don’t want to criticise our country, but culturally, South Korea has tendencies toward voyeurism,” says Kim Mi-soon, who runs the new National Centre for Digital Sexual Crime Response to provide 24-hour support for victims.

“Pornographic or obscene content – videos, messages – has been normalised in the culture. Viewing illegal recordings has sometimes been seen as similar to consuming pornography, which culturally reinforced this behaviour rather than creating awareness of the problem.”

In 2018, tens of thousands of Korean women rallied on the streets of Seoul in then-record protests demanding a government crackdown on the rampant installation of hidden cameras in public toilets, hotels and changing rooms.

Years later, after laws were strengthened in 2020, illegal filming remains the largest category of digital sex crimes handled by police, accounting for a quarter of all cases.

In Seoul, police crews use infrared scanners and detection devices to sweep public toilets for hidden cameras. Last month, signs outside one metropolitan train station bathroom warned of an “illegal filming” crackdown, and the risk of jail time and a 50 million won ($54,000) fine.

This masthead has spoken with several women who were secretly recorded by their male relatives and partners in their homes.

On an August morning last year, Kwak Mi-sun*, then 17 and in her final year of school, was getting changed for her part-time job at a bakery when she noticed a flashing red light on her bedside table.

She found the hidden camera and confronted her older brother, who eventually admitted he had placed it there weeks earlier and offered her money to stay silent. Her father also urged her not to go to the police.

“To my dad, he was a precious son. Dad asked me not to report it,” Kwak says, fighting back tears.

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She confided in a teacher, who was required by law to report it, and spent a month in a women’s shelter as the case was investigated. It ended with her brother getting a 5 million won fine. She says she still doesn’t know what happened to the footage.

“I hope it can give courage to others. There may be people like me who haven’t been able to report such things”.

Jung Hye-jin*, 27, successfully pursued charges against her ex-boyfriend last year after he filmed them having sex without her consent. Investigators found no evidence that he had distributed the video. He was fined 7 million won, but she says the ongoing anxiety is unbearable.

“I check the porn site Yadong Korea almost every day, fearing that my video might show up. I’m still having nightmares and remain afraid of camera lenses,” she says.

The bitter gender wars engulfing digital sex crimes

South Korea is not alone in confronting the challenge of technology-facilitated sexual violence. Many countries, including Australia, have scrambled to sharpen their laws to crackdown on digital sexual crimes, including illegal filming, deepfakes and revenge porn.

As in other jurisdictions, the data shows such crimes are overwhelmingly committed by men against women. But in South Korea, public discussions of these issues are wrapped in the country’s visceral gender politics.

Feminist groups argue that misogyny and sexism should be seen as the root cause of these crimes, and point to data such as Korea having the largest gender pay gap in the developed world as symptomatic of deep structural gender inequality issues.

But others say different causal factors are to blame, such as the country’s global status as a tech leader, its widespread fast internet and smartphone use, and rapid embrace of AI technologies.

Against the backdrop of an intensifying and politicised gender war, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which is responsible for policy on digital sex crimes, has become a target.

Former conservative president Yoon Suk Yeol, who was impeached this year and is facing a criminal trial over a botched martial law attempt, campaigned for office in 2022 on an anti-feminist platform. He declared “there’s no systemic gender discrimination” in South Korea and vowed to abolish the gender equality ministry, a promise ultimately left unfulfilled.

In response to concerns among younger men that they are subject to “reverse discrimination”, new President Lee Jae Myung has recently expanded the ministry’s remit to “address areas where men may face discrimination”.

Noh Hyun-seo, the director of the digital sex crime prevention division within the gender ministry, doesn’t believe patriarchal structures are the driving factor in digital sex crimes.

She points to the agency’s statistics that show a quarter of the more than 10,000 victims supported last year were men and believes the demand for pornography and a more generalised lack of respect between the sexes is the core issue.

“It’s true that many digital sex crimes sexualise women – creating deepfakes of women, sharing non-consensual recordings, distributing and storing them – but this isn’t only due to patriarchal structures or gender conflict,” Noh says.

“Even in cultures without these issues, such content spreads because of market demand [for pornographic content].”

But at the coalface of the challenge, Lee, the support worker, takes a different view.

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“The root cause? I believe at the core lies patriarchy and deep-seated misogyny,” she says.

“Many men don’t view women as equal human beings. And when women rise to the same positions as men, I sense that some men simply cannot tolerate it.”

Park, too, says deepfake crimes are predicated on the dehumanisation of women.

“They turned our photos into trophies for their so-called VIP social clubs, to reinforce their own sense of status. If women had been regarded as equal, that wouldn’t have happened,” she says.

*Victim names in this story have been changed at their request, to protect their identities.

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