Seoul, South Korea
AP
—
A 33-year-old South Korean man was sentenced to life in prison on Monday for running an online extortion ring that sexually exploited or abused 261 victims, including more than a dozen minors, who he raped or assaulted over a four-year period until his arrest in January.
The Seoul Central District Court said that the gravity of Kim Nok-wan’s crimes warranted his “permanent isolation from society.” Ten accomplices have been sentenced to two to four years in prison in what law enforcement officials are calling the nation’s largest cybersex crime case to date.
Starting around August 2020, Kim targeted women who posted sexually suggestive content on social media and men who tried to join secret chat rooms on Telegram to share digitally altered sexual images of acquaintances.
He threatened to expose them, coerced them into recruiting new victims, formed a pyramid-shaped extortion ring on the app, and created and shared manipulated sexual images of his targets, according to details of the crimes revealed in court. Most of them were minors.
Kim raped or assaulted 16 victims, including 14 minors, and recorded videos of the crimes in 13 of them. The court said the defendant created around 1,700 sexually exploitative images and videos of around 70 victims, and distributed around 260 of them online to blackmail those who refused to cooperate, as well as attempting to blackmail some of the victims’ families and colleagues.
The other defendants, including five minors, knew that the victims they recruited through video and image blackmail would face the same sexual exploitation they had endured, but they carried out the acts anyway to prevent their images from being disseminated, the court said.
“The victims, most of whom were children or adolescents, appear to have suffered extreme physical and mental suffering as a result of the crime,” the court said in a statement.
“Digital sex crimes can rapidly amplify victim harm within the digital space, reaching irreversible levels. Also, once sexually exploitative materials have been distributed, it is physically extremely difficult to completely remove them, making recovery from the harm virtually impossible.”
The revelations of Kim’s crimes after his arrest in January sparked public shock and concern about the increased risk of sexual violence enabled by digital technology. Monday’s ruling came nearly five years after the same court sentenced Cho Ju-bin to 40 years in prison for intimidating dozens of women, including minors, into recording sexually explicit videos and selling them to others.
