SOUTH KOREA’S Supreme Court on Thursday finalized the prison sentence of 34 years for Moon Hyung-wook, the 24-year-old creator and operator of the country’s notorious porn channel known as the “Nth Room” on Telegram. Moon was convicted of coercing 21 women and girls between February 2019 and January 2020 into sharing nearly 3,800 sexually explicit videos of themselves for distribution on the sexual exploitation platform. The court also confirmed a 15-year sentence for Kang Hun, 20, for coercing 18 women and girls to film sexually exploitative materials and distributing them online through Telegram. Last month, the court upheld a 42-year-prison sentence handed to Cho Joo-bin, the main perpetrator of the “Nth Room” scandal. The top court also ordered Cho to wear an electronic anklet for 30 years and to pay some 108 million won (US$85,000) in fines. The nation was shocked by a string of sexual exploitation cases centered on group chat rooms of the Telegram messenger service last year, prompting the government to announce get-tough measures against digital sex crimes. After the revelation of the gang, one of the country’s biggest online sex abuse rings, law enforcement authorities have vowed to punish even buyers, advertisers and possessors of child and underage sexual abuse materials, as well as their producers and sellers, and treat any production of digital sexual materials as a felony crime. On April 8, a district court in the city of Andong sentenced Moon, who is known by his username as God God, to 34 years in jail for coercing dozens of women and minors into sharing sexually explicit videos. The court confirmed that since 2017, Moon had lured both young women and girls by promising them high-paying jobs before coercing them into pornography. Additionally, while pretending to be a police officer investigating pornography, he hacked accounts of women who had posted sexually explicit content. With the footage he obtained, he blackmailed the women, even threatening to send the clips to their parents if they did not send him additional content. Under the username God God, Moon was responsible for creating and operating the “Nth Room” chatrooms on the Telegram app, in which he shared at least 3,700 illicit pornographic clips of the victims. Moon was arrested in May 2020 and indicted the following month on 12 counts, including the violation of laws on protecting minors from sexual abuse. The prosecution had demanded a life sentence. He and other accomplices were found to have forced at least 74 people, including 16 minors, into filming sexually abusive content and sold them to the members of their Telegram chatrooms. Prosecutors said Moon produced and possessed sexually explicit videos of 21 girls from early 2017 to early 2019 and blackmailed three parents of his victims by threatening to release such videos. After creating the videos, Moon posted links in various online communities to gather customers, and the customers had to pay to enter the various “Nth Room” chat rooms. The more videos they wanted to watch, the more they had to pay. Of the videos that Moon filmed, the identities of around 40 women have been confirmed. He was also found to have uploaded 3,762 such videos on the messaging app from February 2019 to January 2020. In September 2019, Moon left the “Nth Room.” According to an informant, Moon mentioned that he had to get ready for the college entrance exam, which suggested he was in his last year of high school at the time. However, this turned out to be false. After an extensive investigation by the police, Moon confessed to being “God God” in the “Nth Room.” Moon is a 14th grade student of the Faculty of Architecture of Hanjing University, and it is unknown whether he is currently studying, according to police. He used an encrypted chat software to set up eight chat groups in February 2019 to distribute sexually exploited videos, and he is regarded as the founder of this type of crime. The police stated that Moon searched for more revealing photos on SNS sites, and then sent private messages with Trojan horse viruses to female users who posted these photos to steal their real personal information, and then used these information to threaten them to take sexual exploitation videos. The police also revealed that Moon confessed during the police investigation that he was also instigated by a sexual assault on a female high school student in Daegu in December 2018. The “Nth Room” was an online Telegram chat platform, where thousands of digital sex crimes were committed daily. Hundreds of, if not more, women suffered from being sexually exploitation and violence. It contained very graphic and gruesome descriptions of each act. The head honcho of the “Nth Room” was known as “The Doctor,” who was later revealed by the South Korean police to be Cho. Moon created eight chat rooms. They gathered victims’ personal information from their school, workplace, family or friends with the help of public service workers, and used this information to threaten and punish victims who refused to cooperate. The women were lured on the pretext of jobs, money and luxury items, etc. The operator, Cho, tricked the female victims into sending him nude photos with their faces. He told them it was part of a high-paying part-time job. Once he had what he needed, he would use the naked pictures to blackmail them. He would further go and demean them by referring to the victims as “slaves” on Telegram chat rooms. The male members of the chat rooms were urged to find the girls, rape them, record the acts, and publish the videos. It was tactically used to punish the women by inciting fear that it could happen to them. On March 19, 2020, the first member of the “Nth Room” was apprehended and soon followed the arrest of another 124 suspects. The Telegram platform had 200,000 users. The arrests and the investigation of the dark web platform only came to light when protesters pressured the South Korean Government by signing petitions and marching for justice. Latest details revealed that Cho, who operated the “Nth Room” under the name Baksa, is the main suspect in running the chat rooms that are said to have been influenced by God God. He is believed to have used God God’s methods and created his own series of chat rooms. God God is said to have stopped operating chat rooms created by himself by September 2019, when Baksa became active and made his operations functional. When God God stopped operating the chat rooms, a man whose surname is Jeon and known as Watchman, who till then operated a chat room called Gotham Room, succeeded God God and started operating “Nth Room” too. Police in fact had trailed God God for months together before arresting him. The biggest challenge was tracing his whereabouts and he used false internet protocol address to conduct his online activities. In fact, in a chat room run by Cho, God God had said in January that the police will never be able to catch him. God God is said to have received payments through gift certificates and thought that police would never get hold of him as he did not deal with cryptocurrency. Reports claim that the case was cracked after Senior Superintendent Jeong Seok-hwa, a veteran in handling cybercrimes, got involved in the case. Jeong had also played an important role in arresting Son Jong Woo in 2018, who founded and operated the largest dark web child pornography website in the world. For South Koreans, the case has become a lightning rod for a nation grappling with widespread sexual abuse and accusations of pervasive misogyny. Over 4 million people have signed two petitions demanding the heaviest of punishments for the arrested and calling for the names and faces of all involved to be released. The police have investigated 3,500 suspects, arrested 245, and also identified 1,100 victims. (SD-Agencies) | 