A sexual blackmail ring that operated on the app Telegram and targeted dozens of women, including underage girls, has rocked South Korea and triggered demands for authorities to crack down on the rising number of sexual offences online.
Police yesterday took the unusual step of naming the man who allegedly ran an online network that lured at least 58 women and 16 girls into what authorities called “virtual enslavement” by blackmailing them into sending degrading and, in some cases, violent sexual images of themselves.
Cho Ju-bin faces charges of violating the Child Protection Act, the Privacy Act and the Sexual Abuse Act, as well as abuse, threats and coercion, after he was identified as the blackmail ring’s leader.
Photo: AP
The 25-year-old, who allegedly used the nickname baksa (doctor), is accused of distributing and streaming the videos in a group chatroom on the messaging service Telegram.
Police, who have referred the case to prosecutors, made Cho’s name public after a record 5 million South Koreans signed multiple petitions on the presidential office Web site demanding that authorities reveal his identity.
Wearing a neck brace and handcuffed to his waist, Cho was paraded yesterday before journalists at the Jongno Police Station in Seoul before officers drove him to the prosecutors’ office.
“I apologize to those who were hurt by me,” Cho said as he was led out of the station, but he did not respond when asked by reporters if he had admitted to the charges. “Thank you for ending the life of a demon that I couldn’t stop.”
Police officers created a perimeter around the station’s gate to block off angry protesters, who waved signs that read: “From chatroom to prison” and “Punish all users,” while yelling: “Give him the highest penalty.”
The decision to release Cho’s name came after South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Monday denounced the crimes as “cruel,” adding that public anger was “justifiable.”
Police would also investigate users who paid up to 1.5 million won (US$1,217) in cryptocurrency payments to view the abusive images allegedly uploaded by Cho.
Police said that more than 260,000 people used similar sites, collectively known as Nth rooms, Yonhap news agency reported.
Cho allegedly approached women seeking part-time work and offered them payment in return for nude photographs, Yonhap said.
He then allegedly threatened to reveal the women’s identities unless they sent clips of themselves performing sexual acts, including those involving violence.
Some were forced to carve the word “slave” on their bodies and pose in a way that would prove to chatroom users that they “belonged” to Cho, reports said.
The victims included 16 girls of junior-high school age, South Korean media said.
South Korea is already grappling with an epidemic of secretly filmed images of a sexual nature, known as molka, which are then shared online.
“Through strict investigation, the police will entirely transform the social apathy to digital sex crime and strongly root out such crime from our society,” Korean National Police Agency Commissioner General Min Gap-ryong said.
The agency said that 124 suspects had been arrested and 18 operators — including Cho — of chat rooms on Telegram and other social media had been detained since September last year.
The Korea Herald said the Cho case proved the need to strengthen penalties for sexual crimes.
Currently, those found in possession of abusive images of children receive a year in prison or a fine of 20 million won.
Additional reporting by AP
When Melinda Gates asked her husband, Microsoft Corp cofounder Bill Gates, to let her coauthor the 2013 annual letter about their foundation, the conversation blew up into a fight. “It got hot,” Melinda Gates wrote in her 2019 book The Moment of Lift. “Bill said the process we had for the Annual Letter had been working well for the foundation for years, and he didn’t see why it should change,” she wrote. Ultimately, Bill Gates agreed for her to write a separate piece about contraceptives, while he penned the main letter about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s work. In the next year’s letter,
Part of a huge rocket that launched China’s first module for its Tianhe space station is falling back to Earth and could make an uncontrolled re-entry at an unknown landing point. The 30m-high core of the Long March 5B rocket on Thursday launched the “Heavenly Harmony” uncrewed core module into low Earth orbit from Wenchang in China’s Hainan Province. The Long March 5B then itself entered a temporary orbit, setting the stage for one of the largest-ever uncontrolled re-entries. Some experts fear it could land on an inhabited area. “It’s potentially not good,” said Jonathan McDowell, astrophysicist at the Astrophysics Center at Harvard
Remnants of China’s largest rocket launched last week were expected to plunge back through the atmosphere late yesterday or early today, a US federally funded space-focused research and development center said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday that most debris from the rocket would be burned up on re-entry and is highly unlikely to cause any harm, after the US military said that what it called an uncontrolled re-entry was being tracked by US Space Command. In a Twitter post sent on Friday evening in the US, the Aerospace Corporation said that the latest prediction for the re-entry of
SPIKE LOOMING: Many scientists believe a lack of testing is resulting in a sharp undercounting of cases, with one model forecasting 1,018,879 deaths by the end of July The COVID-19 wave that plunged India into the world’s biggest health crisis has the potential to worsen in coming weeks, with some research models projecting that the death toll could more than double from present levels. A team at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru used a mathematical model to predict that about 404,000 deaths would occur by June 11 if current trends continue. A model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington forecast 1,018,879 deaths by the end of July. While COVID-19 cases can be hard to predict, particularly in a sprawling nation like
RSS