How can sin be reincarnated? ,Restore the second "Room N" incident in South Korea
The "Room N" incident shocked Korean society 4 years ago. The two main culprits were sentenced to prison. However, digital sex crimes have not stopped, and there are other "devils" in the world. Recently, the "Room N" incident broke out at Seoul National University in South Korea. The suspect produced thousands of pornographic photos and videos and spread them privately through the social software Telegram. The modus operandi is similar to that of Room N. The number of female victims currently known is up to 61 people, including Seoul National University students and minors.
According to South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo, on May 24, South Korea’s Prosecutor General Lee Won-seok instructed the Seoul Central District Prosecutor’s Office to thoroughly investigate the “Room N” incident at Seoul National University and severely punish the criminals. "This case involves multiple criminal suspects who systematically and deliberately synthesized, produced, and disseminated false videos for a long time, targeting acquaintances, causing great mental and social pain and harm to the victims."
Five gang suspects have been arrested. Two of the principals are graduates of Seoul National University. For more than three years, they have stolen photos of female classmates and acquaintances, and used "deep forgery" technology to change faces to synthesize pornographic products. On Telegram Dozens of online chat rooms were established to spread the message. They also send synthetic obscenities directly to victims for "abuse."
As the two college students who were the first to discover and expose the "Room N" incident said, what everyone sees is only a small part of the facts, and it is also the smallest part. Digital sex crimes are not uncommon, and different forms of "Room N" may be around. Although South Korea has revised its laws in recent years, stepped up its crackdown on digital sex crimes, and taken measures to assist victims, sexual crimes on the Internet are still rampant, and at the same time, the force against sexual violence and sexual exploitation continues to grow.
Dating back to July 2021, Park, a graduate of Seoul National University, and Jiang, a graduate student at the university, met online and collaborated to use technical means to produce and disseminate pornography. At that time, the "Room N" incident had caused a huge shock to Korean society. In June of that year, the Seoul High Court sentenced Zhao Zhubin, the principal culprit in "Room N", to 42 years in prison.
According to Korean media reports, Park mainly used alumni he met while studying at Seoul National University to create pornographic content by combining their social account avatars and photos, and spread the content in Telegram chat rooms. The police said that Park participated in the production and dissemination of 1,852 illegal photos and videos. Most of the videos were produced by Jiang. At the time of the crime, Jiang was a student at Seoul National University. He used deep forgery technology to create the photos and videos of some female alumni and acquaintances. Graduation photos and social account photos were synthesized with other pornographic content, and then the synthesized products and victim information were provided to Park.
In fact, cases of using deepfake technology to synthesize illegal pornographic products have appeared in many places around the world. The most sensational one is that American singer Taylor Swift had her face changed by AI in January this year, and criminals produced deepfake and synthesized pornographic images. , which has been viewed more than 47 million times on social platform X. A spokesman for the White House said it was "very worrying" and urged the U.S. Congress to legislate on this issue.
Another focus in this case is that Park and Kang are both graduates of Seoul National University. However, the police handling the case called this a "coincidence". They did not know each other offline in the past, and the suspect did not only invite students from Seoul National University to enter Telegram for private chats. room. The method of operation is to first send "links" to target groups individually, invite them to enter the chat room, and then anonymously exchange illegal synthetic content.
After Seoul National University held its first Digital Sex Crime Task Force meeting on May 22, it decided to establish a "Sexual Violence Victim Reporting Center" to provide support to victims.
According to South Korea's "Sexual Violence Punishment Act", Park and Jiang were arrested in April and May respectively. In addition, the police also arrested three other suspects, all of whom produced and distributed illegal synthetics to acquaintances. They have opened more than 200 rooms on the Telegram platform, with at most about 50 users in each room. A police officer said, "The main criminals, including Park, did not profit from illegal products. The purpose of the crime was to satisfy their own sexual desires, not to make a profit."
Over the past few years, the criminal gang has not only produced and distributed illegal pornography, but also sent some of the content to the victims themselves. Some victims have reported crimes to police stations in multiple areas of Seoul and the Sejong Police Station. Due to the high degree of anonymity of the Telegram platform and the "automatic information destruction program" attached to it, it is difficult for the police to track the suspects. After filing multiple cases, the investigation has been stopped midway or The case was hastily concluded.
The victims did not give up. They identified alumni F, who had a common contact information, and appealed to the Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office and the Seoul High Prosecutor's Office, but their appeals were rejected. Afterwards, they filed a complaint with the Seoul High Court. The court sent F to trial in November last year and started the investigation of the case again.
In December last year, at the request of the National Bureau of Investigation of South Korea, the Cyber Investigation Division of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Department launched an investigation into the case. During the investigation, it received key assistance from the non-governmental organization "Tracking Team·Spark", which had previously assisted the police in detecting "Room N". “It was members of this organization who were involved in the case.
"Seoul News" disclosed some details of Yuan Eunji, a member of the "Tracking Team Spark", during the investigation of the case. During her previous investigation of "Room N", Yuan Eun-ji had some understanding of how digital sex crimes operate. She received a request for help from the victims of "Room N" at Seoul National University, so she decided to go undercover again and spent two years. Establish contact with Park during the time. Recently, she posted a 10,000-word long article online, revealing that she pretended to be a male netizen in his 30s who loves pornographic content, and claimed that his wife was a beautiful Seoul National University graduate as bait. Park slowly took the bait and asked Yuan Eun-chi for his so-called wife's underwear. After that, after many offline "transactions", the police finally succeeded in arresting Park in early April.
The arrest of Park and others does not mean the end of the "Room N" incident at Seoul National University. Just like after eight chat rooms appeared on Telegram in 2018, many operators quit one after another and new ones took over. Digital sex crimes Wildfires cannot be extinguished.
“Internet hell” still exists after “Room N”
After the "Room N" incident was exposed that year, Korean director Choi Jin-sung directed the documentary "Cyber Hell: The Revealed Story of Room N" based on real events, which brought a strong impact to Korean audiences and left the aftermath of "Room N" Shocked again. Cui Jincheng said in an interview with the media that he wanted to say to criminals through this work, "You will definitely be caught."
Since "Room N", South Korea's political, legal, cultural and civilian circles have gained a basic understanding of digital sex crimes and developed a strong sense of resistance. In addition to substantive punishment for criminals, the South Korean Congress passed a series of laws and regulations related to "Room N". South Korea's Supreme Prosecutor's Office issued the "Standards for Handling Digital Sex Crime Cases", formally defining "sexual exploitation videos" and formulating prosecution standards for those who filmed sexual exploitation videos. In 2021, the South Korean Congress also passed the "Telegram "Room N" Incident Prevention Act", including increasing the right of minors to make independent sexual decisions from 13 years old to 16 years old.
In March last year, the Seoul City Government in South Korea announced the introduction of AI technology to monitor digital sex crimes. The "Seoul Digital Sex Crime Security Support Center" will use artificial intelligence technology to implement 24-hour real-time monitoring on social platforms, automatically find sex crime videos related to victims, and delete the videos in a timely manner to prevent the videos from being circulated again. In the past, staff only relied on the naked eye to identify the victim's face and characteristics to find relevant videos. After the introduction of artificial intelligence and deep learning technology, audio, video and text information can be comprehensively analyzed.
After taking multi-pronged measures, South Korean people's awareness of preventing digital crimes has increased, but criminal cases are still common. According to statistics from the Korean Police Agency, there were 3,201 digital sex crime cases in 2022 and 2,314 cases in 2023. In 2022, the Australian police arrested a Korean man in his 20s in Sydney. Since 2020, this man threatened 9 minors to take more than 1,200 sexual exploitation videos and photos and spread them on social networks. The incident was called the "Second Room N" incident by Korean media.
Some international non-governmental organizations have warned that "Room N" represents a novel and particularly egregious digital sex crime model. It is part of a broader trend that requires a comprehensive response from South Korea and other countries. Governments should carefully reform criminal laws to protect women from the threat of violence.
For victims, resisting digital sexual violence is a difficult and painful process. From a series of cases such as "Room N", it can be seen that criminals are accustomed to using existing illegal video content to threaten victims and force them to help produce more content. Unless victims reach an agreement with the perpetrators to remove illegal pornography secretly circulating on the Internet, they can only rely on the intervention of technology companies.
Yoon Ji-hyun, director of Amnesty International's Korean branch, pointed out that submitting a deletion application to an online platform is a painful process in itself, as they must repeatedly search and collect content about their victimization. Even if users finally successfully submit complaints, they still face difficulties in communicating with technology companies. For example, the victim Luo Xianzhen once submitted a complaint to Google, requesting the removal of sexually violent content, but it took more than a year to wait for the result. "It's easy for a criminal to upload a video, but it takes us months to remove it," she said.
As an Internet censorship agency, the Korea Broadcasting and Communications Review Commission reviewed a total of 180,000 digital sex crime cases from 2019 to 2023, of which illegally filmed sexual acts and sexual exploitation images accounted for 91.1%, but after review, only 0.3% of relevant content eventually cleared.
Activists from ProjectReSET, a South Korean organization that monitors and reports online sexual abuse, told the media that laws and systems need to be improved to deal with digital sex crimes more specifically. There are still some loopholes, such as the distribution of sexually exploitative content without knowing the identity and whereabouts of the victim, which is considered pure pornography and not a sex crime. In addition, the prevalence of this crime is often attributed to the low status of Korean women in patriarchal society and the country's rapid technological development. If women could speak out more, and if their rights could be improved, it would be possible to reduce crime rates.
As written in the postscript of "Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise", "Any sexual violence is 'social', or it should be said that any sexual violence is not done independently by the perpetrator. It’s up to society as a whole to assist the perpetrators.”
