South Korea is reeling from yet another sex scandal that victimizes young women into performing torture porn. With over 2.3 million netizens, including celebrities, calling for the revelation of the identities and perpetrators and the most severe punishment imposed on the guilty parties, here's everything we know so far about the Nth Room Sex Scandal.
First reports. The first reports of young girls being victimized by a blackmail syndicate first came out as early as November through the Korean newspaper Hankyoreh. A follow-up report was released By Koonmin Ilbo which detailed the operation of the sex syndicate this month.
Nth Room Sex Ring. The syndicate reportedly recruited young girls by offering part-time jobs in exchange for gift certificates. Seventy-four young women, including 16 minors were roped into the operations and blackmailed into performing sordid sexual acts such as cutting out the world slave on their skins with a knife, eating feces, inserting foreign objects into their private parts, and being victimized by assigned rapists.
Victim Profile. According to some reports, most of the victims were runaway teenagers who were active in chatrooms. Some were engaged in prostitution or sexting for money. After they were contacted by Nth Room operators with the promise of high paying gigs, they were systematically duped into revealing personal information as well as photos of their bodies which were eventually used to blackmail them into performing torture porn acts for the chatrooms.
Another report indicated that the girls were lured by a fake Twitter account asking them for information to make their accounts safer. However, as girls clicked on the link, their information was extracted by the culprits and used as blackmail material to get the girls to perform sexual acts for distribution in the chat.
Distribution. The videos were reportedly distributed through Nth Room chatrooms through the encrypted Telegram app. The Korea Cyber Sexual Violence Response Unit recorded 260,000 users across 56 chat rooms which included the footages from the female victims as well as sexcam or molka videos taken without the consent of the women. Some of the content shared contained deep fake footages created by users themselves.
Profit. Some 25,000 active users across 30 chat rooms paid for the privilege of viewing the torture porn materials, some paying as much as 1.5 million won (USD $1200) to view premium content or those that were uploaded in real-time. The users can only access this content upon paying the fee and uploading their own sexual abuse content through a secondary gateway chatroom to prove themselves.
Arrests. Police initially arrested the reported ringleader of the Nth Room syndicate identified as Baksa or Doctor. Due to public demand, his identity has been released by authorities. Baksa, who is being eyed as the mastermind behind the operation, was identified as Jo Joo Bin, a 25-year-old college graduate who majored in Information and Communications. The suspect was reportedly good in academics and editorials and even won scholarships during his school years.
A total of 97 people have been arrested in connection to the torture porn operation of Nth Room in the Telegram app while a thorough investigation has been ordered by President Moon Jae In.