SEOUL — A South Korean man was sentenced to 34 years in jail on Thursday as a part of the nation’s crackdown on an infamous network of on-line chat rooms that lured younger girls, together with minors, with guarantees of high-paying jobs earlier than forcing them into pornography.

The man, Moon Hyeong-wook, opened one of many first such websites in 2015, prosecutors mentioned. Mr. Moon, 25, operated a clandestine members-only chat room beneath the nickname “GodGod” on the Telegram messenger app, providing greater than 3,700 clips of illicit pornography, they mentioned.

Mr. Moon, an structure main who was expelled from his school after his arrest final yr, was one of the infamous of the lots of of individuals the police have arrested in the middle of their investigation. Another chat room operator, a person named Cho Joo-bin, was sentenced to 40 years in jail final November.

“The accused inflicted irreparable damage on his victims through his anti-society crime that undermined human dignity,” the presiding decide, Cho Soon-pyo,​ mentioned of Mr. Moon in his ruling on Thursday.​ The trial occurred in a district courtroom within the metropolis of Andong in central South Korea​.

Mr. Moon was indicted in June on prices​ of forcing 21 younger girls, together with minors, into ​making ​sexually specific movies between 2017 and early final yr.​

He ​approached younger girls trying for high-paying jobs by means of social media platforms​, then lured them into making sexually specific movies, promising massive payouts​, prosecutors mentioned​.​ He additionally hacked into the web accounts of ladies who uploaded sexually specific content material, pretending to be a police officer investigating pornography.

​Once he obtained maintain of the photographs and private information, he used them to blackmail the ladies, threatening to ship the clips to their mother and father until the victims provided extra footage, prosecutors mentioned.

Prosecutors demanded a life sentence for Mr. Moon.

Last December, the police mentioned​ that they had investigated 3,500 suspects, most of them males of their 20s or youngsters, as a part of their investigation of the web chat rooms that served as avenues for sexual exploitation and pornographic distribution​. They arrested 245 of them.

The police additionally recognized 1,100 victims.

The ​scandal, recognized in South Korea as “the Nth Room Case,” brought about outrage over the merciless exploitation of the younger girls​. Women’s rights teams picketed courthouses the place chat room operators have been on trial, accusing judges of condoning intercourse crimes by handing down what they thought-about gentle punishments.

On Thursday, exterior the Andong courthouse, advocates held a rally demanding the utmost punishment for Mr. Moon.

In latest years, the South Korean police started cracking down on sexually specific file-sharing web sites as a part of worldwide efforts to struggle youngster pornography. As smartphones proliferated, ​they quickly realized that a lot of the unlawful commerce was migrating to on-line chat rooms on messaging providers like Telegram.

The police mentioned that they had bother monitoring down clients of the web chat rooms as a result of they typically used cryptocurrency funds to keep away from being caught.



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