Seoul, Korea
CNN
–
Luma was having lunch on the summer of 2021. Her phone started to explode with notifications.
They were devastating when she opened the message. The photo of her face was taken from social media, edited on her naked body, and was shared with dozens of users in chat rooms on messaging app Telegram.
The comments on screenshots in the chat room were mean and vulgar – as were the text from an anonymous messenger who sent her images. “Not funny?… watching your own sex video,” they wrote. “Please be honest and enjoy this.”
The harassment escalated to the threat to share the images more widely, and the police would not be able to find the perpetrator. The sender seemed to know her personal details, but she had no way of identifying them.
“I was hit by all these images I never imagined in my life,” said Ruma, who CNN identifies by her pseudonym for privacy and safety.
Revenge porn, an unconsensual sharing of sexual images, exists roughly as long as the internet, but the surge in AI tools means that anyone, even if they have never taken or sent a naked photo, is targeted by explicit deepfakes.
South Korea has a particularly recent history of digital sex crimes, from hidden cameras in public facilities to telegram rooms in chat rooms where women and girls were forced to and threatened to post sleazy sexual content.
However, Deepfake technology is currently poses new threats, and the crisis is particularly severe in schools. Between January and early November last year, more than 900 students, teachers and school staff reported that they had been victims of deep fake sex crimes, according to data from the national Ministry of Education. These numbers do not include universities that were also seen as deepfark porn attacks.
In response, the ministry established an emergency task force. And in September, lawmakers revised to own and watch Deepfark porn for up to three years of prison or up to 30 million won (over $20,000).
Creating and distributing explicit images of Deepfark under nonconsensuality will result in a maximum sentence of five to seven years.
South Korea’s National Police Agency urged the official gazette to “take the lead in deep-sea sex crimes that completely eradicate it.”
However, police arrested 23 of the 964 deep-sea-related sexual crime cases reported between January and October last year, according to a statement from Seoul National Police.
“The investigation and punishment have been so passive so far,” Councilman Kim Nam-hee told CNN. That’s why some victims, like Ruma, are doing their own research.
A victim of AI-generated revenge porn reports that the CNN incident changed her “whole personality”
Luma was a 27-year-old college student when the nightmare first began. When she went to police, they told her they would request user information from Telegram, but warned that the platform was notorious for not sharing such data, she said.
Luma, a retired student who once enjoyed school and active social life, said the incident had completely changed her life.
“It broke my belief system about the world,” she said. “The fact that they can humiliate and infringe you to that extreme will hurt you almost irrevocably.”
She decided to act after learning that the investigation into reports by other students had ended several months later.
Ruma and fellow students sought help from Won Eun-Ji, an activist who gained national fame after revealing South Korea’s largest digital sex crime group on Telegram in 2020.
Wong agreed to help, created a fake telegram account, posed as a man in his 30s, and infiltrated the chat room where images of deepfakes were circulating. She carefully collected information for almost two years, and involved other users in the conversation.
As police confronted the suspect, Wong sent him a telegram message. His phone pinged – he was caught.
Two former students from the prestigious Seoul National University (SNU) were arrested in May last year. The main perpetrator was ultimately sentenced to nine years in prison for producing and distributing sexually exploitative materials, while the accomplice was sentenced to three or five years in prison.
Police told CNN that at least 61 victims have been identified, including 12 more SNU students. “Schools will strengthen preventive education, raise awareness of digital sex crimes among university members, protect victims and prevent recurrence,” Seoul National University said in a briefing after the incident.
An excerpt from the verdict shared by Ruma’s lawyers states, “I dislike the false explicit material produced by the perpetrators, and the conversations around me are shocking.
In response to the verdict, Ruma told CNN, “I didn’t think the sentence would exactly match the prosecutor’s request. I’m happy, but this is my first trial. I’m not completely relieved yet.”
Ruma’s case was one of the thousands of people in South Korea, with some victims receiving less help from police.
Kim, a high school teacher, told CNN in July 2023 that she was targeted for exploitation. She said she was urgently showing Twitter screenshots of inappropriate photos taken in the classroom, focusing on her body.
“My hands started to shake,” she recalls. “When was this photo taken? Who would upload something like that?”
CNN identifies Kim by her last name only for her privacy and safety.
However, she said the situation got worse two days later. Her hair became messy and her body was changed to make her look like she was turning back. Manipulation photos of her face have been added to nude photos. The sophisticated technology made the images unsettled.
Police told her that the only option to identify the poster is to request user information from Twitter, a social media platform that Elon Musk purchased in 2022 and reformed as X in 2023.
Kim and her colleagues are also victims of secret filming, and using official channels to identify users takes too long. We have started our own research.
They identified the person: a quiet, introverted student, “someone who wouldn’t imagine you doing something like that,” Kim said.
The person was charged, but she said life was never the same, regardless of what happens in court.
She said the lack of public empathy made her annoyed. “I have read a lot of articles and comments about deepfakes.
According to X’s current policy, obtaining user information involves obtaining a subpoena, court order, or other valid legal document and submitting a request regarding a law enforcement letterhead through the website.
X says it is the company’s policy to notify users that a request has been made.
The reliability rules state that users may not “share non-self-authenticated content on X, which can deceive people or lead to harm.”
Activist Wynn said for a long time that sharing and viewing women’s sexual content has not been considered a serious crime in South Korea.
Pornography is prohibited, but authorities have long failed to enforce the law or punish criminals, and have won.
Social indifference makes it easier for perpetrators to commit digital sexual offences, she won, including what she called “acquaintance.”
“Humiliation of an acquaintance” often starts with sharing photos and personal information about women you know on Telegram, creating Deepfark content, and offering to ask others to do so. As the attacker knows his personal information, as well as details about his work, work, and even his family, he lives in fear as he knows that the attacker poses a real threat to his own safety and anonymous users will directly harass women.
Television since the biggest digital sex exploitation incident in Korea In 2020, Wong said the sexual exploitation ecosystem fluctuated and reduced during a massive police investigation, but once authorities were eased it expanded again.
The victim CNN interviewed all those who were asked to punish more heavier punishment for the perpetrator. Prevention is important, but “we need to make a proper judgment when these cases arise,” Kim said.
Online platforms are also under pressure to act.
Having become a fertile space for various digital crimes, Telegram has announced that it will increase the sharing of user data with authorities as part of a broader crackdown on illegal activities.
The move comes after the company’s CEO, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France in August on a warrant related to Telegram’s lack of moderation, marking a turning point for the platform, long recognized for its commitment to privacy and encrypted messaging. Durov is currently under official investigation but is permitted to leave France, he said in a telegram post.
Last September, South Korea’s media regulators agreed to establish a hotline that would help Telegram wipe out illegal content from the app, and said it had removed 148 digital sex crime videos as requested by regulators.
Wong welcomed the move, but said that if Telegram doesn’t show any significant progress anytime soon, the government should remove the app from the app store in order to remove it from the app store. “This has been far too long,” she said.
In a statement to CNN, Telegram said the company “has a zero-tolerance policy for illegal porn,” and “fights illegal porn and platform abuse using a combination of human moderation, AI and machine learning tools and reports from users and trusted organizations.”
According to Seoul Police, South Korean authorities have marked this the first time they have obtained crime-related data from Telegram.
Fourteen people, including six minors, have been arrested, as they allegedly sexually exploited more than 200 victims through Telegram. The ringleaders of Criminal Ring are said to have targeted men and women of all ages since 2020, and over 70 others were investigating to be allegedly creating and sharing Deepfake Exploation Materials, Seoul police said.
Meanwhile, the victim told CNN that he hopes other women in their positions will receive more support from police and courts in the future.
“No matter how much punishment is increased, there are still far more victims who suffer because the perpetrators are not caught. So I feel that the verdict is still far from a real change or realising justice,” Luma said. “There’s a long way to go.”
