“Best chatrooms full of real-time slaves.” Such a chat room description exposes the clearly disturbing psyche behind the recently surfaced series of cyber sex crimes, informally referred to as the “Telegram Room No. N” case. Under a system involving sexual exploitation and illegal distribution, these chat rooms have created never-ending vicious circles of sexual slavery and harassment towards their victims. Harder to trace than ever before, it seems cyber sex crime in Korea has mutated into a disturbingly elusive form; one that must soon be grasped and eradicated.

In November, 2019, Hankyoreh became the first journalism source to report in depth on the “Telegram Room No. N” case, a set of sexual exploitation crimes on Telegram, an open-source instant messaging service. According to Hankyoreh, at least 30 women’s personal information and explicit photographs were illegally distributed through Telegram since February 2019. Each chat room had 300 to 700 participants who openly, verbally, and sexually harassed the victims. There were eight chat rooms that were each given a number, hence the name “Room No. N.” Beginning with this now infamous case, a stream of sex crimes, similar in design, has followed the secret chat rooms of Telegram with no signs of stopping.

The Mechanism Behind Crimes

While the “Room No. N” case and its copycats fall under the general category of “cyber sex crime,” they can be grouped under a narrower category because they follow the same mechanism. Although the tactics of individual criminals vary, these crimes follow the pattern of contact, leverage establishment, distribution, and production. Through these steps, the chat room creators become equipped with a sustainable financial model with which they operate the sexual exploitation chat rooms on Telegram.

The assembly of extortion begins when contact is first initiated. An unsuspecting victim is contacted through a personal account on internet platforms, such as Twitter. The criminal then extracts personal information by pretending to be a police officer who is investigating the victim for certain charges or by sending a false log-in link into which victims enter their ID and password. In other cases, the victim initiates contact after reading an internet post imitating a job advertisement. With the extracted personal information, leverage is established and the offenders blackmail victims into sending them nude photographs and videos.

This explicit content is then illegally distributed in secure Telegram chat rooms, sometimes along with the victims’ personal information. After paying a designated amount of “sponsor fee” with untraceable cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, chat room participants devour and verbally abuse the victims sexually through the photographs and videos they received. From then on, because of the already established leverage, it becomes easy for the chat room operators to force victims to continuously deliver sexual content. Some offenders, such as the infamous “Baksa,” go so far as to take their operation off the virtual world and retain offline workers who track down and blackmail victims in person.

Is There a Way Out?

Despite severe proliferation of sexual exploitation crimes utilizing the same mechanism since the “Room No. N” crime, this set of crimes has yet to be collectively quashed due to legal implications. The most commonly cited obstruction to investigating such crimes is the location of its server. Like other programs of its kind, Telegram is not a Korea-based company and its server exists overseas, most recently operating in Dubai. This specific property causes issues regarding investigation of information stored in non-Korean servers by Korean authorities because the only way to investigate would be via cooperation with the Dubai police, leading to technical and legal difficulties.

According to Professor Lee Won-Sang (Chosun University, Department of Law), “Because Korea already has criminal cooperation treaties with many nations, in normal circumstances, cyber sex crime investigations are possible. However, in a *realistic* sense, these types of investigations take longer than usual and may be stunted due to the cooperating country’s situation.” Therefore, while Korean criminals on Telegram are legally subject to investigation from Korean investigatory agencies, it is not easy to carry out because of technical difficulties regarding transnational police cooperation.

Direct regulation of platforms also seems to be a difficult road; platforms with criminal activity, in this case Telegram, are often able to evade investigatory agencies’ power. Korea’s political and economic national power, smaller in comparison to superpowers’ such as the United States (U.S.) and Russia, makes it challenging to enforce domestic laws on foreign enterprises like Telegram. In such circumstances, enthusiastic regulation of criminal activity on the platform’s part can only be voluntary, not legally mandatory.

Although it seems like there is obstacle after obstacle, the issue of online sex crime has too great of a magnitude to abandon. Cooperative investigation with other nations has unfolded and can continue despite difficulties. Multinational investigations into dark web child pornography websites and the main server of Soranet have concluded successfully by charging the responsible parties. The public’s support for sex crime resolution is notable as well; with over 100,000 digital signatures, “The Petition for the Resolution of Sex Crimes on Telegram” became the first ever to be considered for legislation through the National Assembly Petition system. Being considered, however, seems to be where its progress ended. Although a reform bill on sexual violence was voted for in a plenary session of the National Assembly on March 5, it seems that a disappointingly small proportion of the four main requests of the petition was indeed included in the bill.

The most important step that needs to be taken, however, is a fundamental one. In addition to suggesting the introduction of novel investigative methods such as undercover operations and limited online searches, Professor Lee comments, “The current domestic laws regarding sex crimes are very patchy and without basis. Therefore, the resolution of cyber sex crimes in Korea lies not in simply raising sentence periods but reforming the *entire* criminal law and justice system to encompass cyber crime.”

While the tactics behind cyber sex crimes have been constantly evolving to evade legal consequences, it seems the criminal law system has not, leaving legal loopholes wide open for exploitation. Unless the necessary actions are taken, other crimes with similar designs will make reality a repetitive nightmare for current and potential victims. Although the method with which this issue will be resolved is undetermined, it seems clear that it is about time for cyber sex crimes to go west once and for all.