A sprawling deepfake sex crime scandal has swept across South Korea, with some 60% of victims found to be minors, police said Friday. Photo by Christopher Schirner/Flickr
As South Korea faces a sprawling deepfake sex crime scandal, police data released Friday revealed that nearly six out of 10 victims were minors.
Local media reports detailing the spread of fake, AI-generated pornographic images of ordinary women and girls, hosted in chat rooms on the Telegram messaging app, have sent shockwaves across the country in recent days. Advertisement
Many of the chat rooms — one of which was found to have over 220,000 members by South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh — are based at universities and high schools, and target students and teachers.
The crime has turned out to be alarmingly widespread. A survey of students, teachers and staff at K-12 schools by the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union released Thursday found that more than 20% of respondents said that they were either direct or indirect victims of deepfake pornography. Advertisement
The number of reported deepfake cases has soared this year, from 156 in 2021 to 297 cases as of July this year, according to the National Police Agency, which announced an intensive effort to track and arrest deepfake creators and distributors on Tuesday.
According to data submitted Friday by the police agency to Rep. Yang Boo-nam of the Democratic Party of Korea, 315 out of the 527 victims — or 59.8% — in reported cases between 2021 and 2023 were teenagers.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol called on authorities this week to step up efforts to combat the crimes.
“Deepfake videos may be dismissed as mere pranks, but they are clearly criminal acts that exploit technology under the shield of anonymity,” Yoon said during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday. “Anyone can be a victim of such digital sex crimes.”
The scandal has emerged as Telegram’s billionaire founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested and indicted this week by French authorities for allegedly permitting criminal activity on the app, including drug trafficking, child sexual content and fraud.
The Korea Communications Standards Commission, the country’s media regulator, announced this week that it plans to set up a round-the-clock hotline with Telegram to monitor and delete deepfake videos and has asked French authorities for regular cooperation. Advertisement
Women’s rights groups, however, have criticized the lack of government response to digital sex crimes that have been rampant for years in South Korea.
In 2019, another Telegram-based digital sex scandal drew widespread outrage. The so-called “Nth room” case involved criminals blackmailing girls into sharing sex videos, with many victims being underage.
The outcry over that case followed mass protests in 2018 against a spycam epidemic in South Korea, in which secret videos taken from public restrooms, changing rooms, subways and buses were widely sold and shared online. And 2019’s Burning Sun scandal, in which K-pop stars and other powerful figures were implicated in charges of rape and hidden sex videos, further inflamed public sentiment.
“In a society that does not properly punish or prevent crimes and violence against women, we are literally living without a state, without a sense of safety in our daily lives,” Korean women’s rights group Womenlink said in a statement Monday.
“With the advancement of technology, the patterns of crime are diversifying,” the statement said. “Can a society survive in which the daily safety of millions of its members is threatened? This is a state of national emergency.”
Heather Barr, associate director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, said that digital sex crimes in South Korea are causing lingering trauma for victims, even driving some to suicide. Advertisement
“The country’s leaders seem to have had difficulty understanding the extraordinary and often lifelong harm these crimes cause,” Barr said in a statement.
“The South Korean government has known for years that digital sex crimes were rampant and deadly,” she said. “It’s time for them to take this crisis more seriously.”
