hankyoreh

The front page of the Hankyoreh from Nov. 25, 2019, the start of a series of reporting on sexually explicit materials spreading on the messaging app Telegram. (provided by Netflix)

“Images of you are being used illegally. Please click the link to confirm.”

For women in South Korea, messages like these spark undeniable terror. They are sent as part of a phishing ploy, where the user’s personal information is intercepted the moment they click to check.

It’s a startlingly common experience, where victims find themselves helplessly drawn into a trap by criminals. For them, it’s the beginning of a descent into hell.

The documentary “Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror” (2022, directed by Choi Jin-seong) starts with a moment like this, in which a victim is ensnared by one such criminal. The makers opted for an approach that involved focusing on the hunt for the culprits rather than interviewing the victims directly, due to fears that interviews would unnecessarily add to their suffering.

The central figures in the documentary are some of the main contributors to getting to the bottom of the case, including members of the group Team Flame and Hankyoreh reporters Kim Wan and Oh Yeon-seo.

The Nth Room case bears basic similarities to the Soranet pornography site case, in terms of involving digital sex crimes in which illegally photographed material was being shared for money.

But it is also distinct in being a case of an organized, “non-face-to-face” crime involving the abuse of new forms of technology to exploit women — including the culprits’ use of difficult-to-trace Telegram services to coerce the victims in real time and generate profits in cryptocurrency.

Early on in the documentary, the director poses questions to South Korean society, which was largely apathetic when the first report on the Nth Room case was published on the Hankyoreh’s front page in 2019.

The interviewees voice their dismay at the lack of any major response from other news outlets, police, or the public. Their replies offer a crucial opportunity to reflect on how inured South Korean society has become to the sexual exploitation of women.

As if conscious of that apathy, the perpetrators applied pressure in sophisticated ways on the reporters covering the case — all while committing even worse abuses. They tracked down the journalists’ personal information, and even applied the names of certain news outlets to their victims.

The documentary shines a particular light on the efforts made by Team Flame, a pair of women in their 20s who did everything in their power to draw public attention to the case and have the culprits apprehended. Through their ongoing efforts to gather video footage of the victims — including disguising themselves as consumers of the illicit content — they provided the police with pivotal clues.

It was the combination of Team Flame’s hard work and the courage of victims in reporting the abuses that the criminals were finally caught.

In the documentary, the reporters say they expressed their regret to a victim whose identity became public through their reports — but that the victim told them they should not see it that way. The incident was in urgent need of societal attention, and public opinion was pivotal in it being recognized as a crime.

Many internet users embarked on a hashtag campaign, while people in different regions of South Korea put up posters calling on society to take more notice. To some of the victims, those activities may have felt like a lifeline.

But Cho Ju-bin and Moon Hyung-wook were not the only ones who tormented the victims — so did countless other Nth Room users. Of them, few have been arrested.

Under the 20th National Assembly, the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Punishment of Sexual Crimes was amended to impose prison sentences of up to 3 years or fines of up to 30 million won for those possessing, purchasing, storing, or viewing illegally photographed material of a sexual nature.

But according to an article analyzing the rulings for the initial trials of some of the Nth Room participants, 74% received only suspended sentences.

The subtitle of the documentary’s original Korean title translates as “Bringing Down the Nth Room.” It’s a reflection of the wishes of the many people working together in the film, but it also reads like an ongoing call to South Korean society as a whole. The case is still ongoing, in the present continuous tense.

By Kangyu Garam, film director

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]