Seoul, South Korea
AP
—
A 33-year-old South Korean man was sentenced to life in jail Monday for working a web based blackmail ring that sexually exploited or abused 261 victims, together with greater than a dozen minors he raped or assaulted, over a four-year interval earlier than his arrest in January.
The Seoul Central District Court stated the severity of Kim Nok-wan’s crimes warrants his “permanent isolation from society.” It sentenced 10 accomplices to jail phrases starting from two to 4 years in what regulation enforcement authorities describe because the nation’s largest cybersex crime case so far.
Starting round August 2020, Kim focused ladies who posted sexually suggestive content material on social media, and males making an attempt to hitch secret Telegram chat rooms for sharing digitally-manipulated sexual pictures of acquaintances.
He threatened to reveal them and coerced them into recruiting new victims, forming a pyramid-like blackmail ring on the app that produced and shared manipulated sexual pictures of their targets, most of whom had been minors, in line with particulars of the crimes revealed in courtroom.
Kim raped or assaulted 16 victims, together with 14 minors, and recorded movies of his crimes in 13 of these circumstances. He created roughly 1,700 sexually exploitative pictures or movies concentrating on about 70 victims, disseminating round 260 of them on-line to threaten those that refused to cooperate, and likewise tried to blackmail a number of the victims’ members of the family and work colleagues, the courtroom stated.
The different defendants, together with 5 minors, knew that the victims they recruited by threats involving video and pictures would face the identical sexual exploitation that they had endured, however carried out the acts anyway to stop their very own pictures from being circulated, the courtroom stated.
“Most of the victims were children or adolescents, and it appears they would have suffered extreme physical and psychological pain as a result of the crimes,” the courtroom stated in a press release.
“Digital sex crimes can rapidly amplify the damages of the victims to an irreparable level in the digital space, and once sexually exploitative materials are distributed, it’s physically very difficult to completely remove them, making recovery from damage practically impossible.”
The revelation of Kim’s crimes following his January arrest triggered public shock and concern over the rising danger of sexual violence enabled by digital applied sciences. Monday’s ruling got here virtually 5 years after the identical courtroom issued a 40-year jail time period for Cho Ju-bin on fees of blackmailing dozens of ladies, together with minors, into filming sexually specific movies and promoting them to others.