authorities in south korea have handed a
40-year jail term
to this 24-year-old recent graduate
for heading an online sexual blackmail
ring
choju bin coerced women into sharing
degrading sexual images and videos of
themselves
and sold these onto paying viewers in
online
chat rooms prosecutors said 38 people
were involved in total
in what they called virtual enslavement
of women and teenagers
online he called himself the doctor
these days all of south korea knows his
real name
choju bin was arrested in march for
running a notorious sex abuse chat room
today the court in seoul decided he'll
spend the next four decades in prison
for it
outside the court female activists read
out statements
from some of cho's victims
in order for everyone to live in a safe
society in the future
the court should also impose severe
punishment on accomplices
and set an example to prevent such evil
from happening again
in total there were 74 victims including
16 underage girls
prosecutors said the women were
blackmailed into filming degrading and
sometimes violent
sexual imagery of themselves that
imagery
was then distributed to paying customers
via the messaging app telegram
at least 10 000 people use cho's chat
room
some paying up to a thousand euros for
access
we live in a digital society that's
evolving every day
those who committed these terrible
crimes are not human beings
the south korean justice system has long
been accused of failing the victims of
sexual violence
it was one of the issues targeted in me
too protests in 2018.
activists have welcomed cho's sentence
as a step in the right direction
but there's still a long way to go after
his arrest
south korean police identified dozens of
similar chat rooms
and said they're being used by tens of
thousands of people
and journalist frank smith joins me now
for more on this from seoul frank
do we know how this ring of sexual
blackmail worked
well what the managers of this site
would do
is they would recruit
a young teens female teens generally
at-risk teens
with the promise of securing them work
as models
and they'd have them upload their
photographs
and then slowly get more information
from them
their names and their address and then
they'd ask them to upload more explicit
material
and then use that content to blackmail
them
into providing more explicit material
and videos and then they would post
those videos
to uh a sharing website
that required uh secure passwords
and then they would ask you know users
potential users of that website
to pay them upwards of 1200 u.s dollars
and those people those users would then
have to
prove themselves by uploading their own
explicit material there was something
like 50
of these chat rooms involved and
something like 250
000 people accessing um
these explicit chat rooms it's pretty
sordid
it's not the first instance though of
digital sex crimes
against women in in south korea frank
why does this keep happening
well that's a good question we we you
know we don't need to go far back to
to look at some other scandals that have
happened here recently the burning sun
scandal
which uh you know caught some
some k-pop idol stars some entertain
entertainers involved in drugging women
at a nightclub called the burning sun
and then
sexually assaulting them videoing that
sexual assault and then
uploading it and sharing it on message
sharing
apps it has to do perhaps with a culture
here
if we look at the nightclub culture
there's a a thing called booking where
men typically occupy rooms within a
nightclub and women in other rooms and
then staff
are suggested to go into the rooms with
the women and bring women
into the rooms with the men kind of
deliver them
and it in a way commodifies women here
we've had other scandals as well
the whole um spying scandal spy cam
scandal where cameras were put in
washrooms various public washrooms
to spy on women's and then uh upload
videos of those um cameras
and other similar uh to this telegram
sex
scandal similar scandals where uh videos
have been taken without women's consent
of a sexual nature and uploaded onto
uh websites that share those videos more
widely
we leave it there for the time being but
thank you so much for joining us frank
smith in seoul