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(Hankyoreh file photo)

The arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, 39, in France on Saturday has sparked renewed attention to the messenger service’s history as a conduit for various cybersex trafficking cases that have shaken South Korea to its very core. 
 
After amassing a wealth of South Korean users after two waves of so-called “Telegram migrations” in 2014 and 2016, the messenger became a cesspit for cyber sex crimes but has responded only with silence to requests from local law enforcement for its cooperation in tracking down perpetrators. 
 
Telegram became an important messaging app in Korea 10 years ago, during the Park Geun-hye administration. After Park complained in a September 2014 Cabinet meeting that “defamation of the president was growing out of hand,” prosecutors put together an investigation team to keep tabs on the spread of “online disinformation.”
 
When it was revealed those prosecutors were monitoring various mobile messaging applications, KakaoTalk users began fleeing to Telegram. Telegram, a company founded in Germany in 2013 and that currently is headquartered in Dubai, UAE, is known for its strong security. Its secret chats, which utilize end-to-end encryption, are impossible for anyone who is not the sender or recipient to decipher.
 
The passing of the Act on Counter-Terrorism for the Protection of Citizens and Public Security a year later in April 2016 prompted a second round of users to flock to Telegram. Users of domestic messaging apps such as KakaoTalk were once again spooked into changing messaging services after word began to spread that the government, most notably the National Intelligence Service, was keeping such applications under surveillance. A string of politicians signed up for Telegram, including not only the opposition but also members of the Liberty Korea Party — the then-ruling party that had spearheaded the passage of the bill.
 
As concerns over the infringement of privacy by law enforcement agencies continued to surface, Telegram’s user base in South Korea expanded rapidly. According to MobileIndex Insight, a data management platform that analyzes app usage, as of April, Telegram had 3 million monthly active users in South Korea, ranking second only to KakaoTalk (44.92 million).
 
However, Telegram’s strong security comes at a hefty cost. The Nth Room case, a criminal case involving cybersex trafficking through Telegram, highlighted such risks.
 
According to a request asking for data from Telegram obtained by Democratic Party lawmaker Kim Young-bae from the National Police Agency in October 2020, the police sent seven requests to Telegram for over seven months to ask for their cooperation to investigate the Nth Room case, only to be snubbed.
 
As the police were unable to identify the email address of Telegram’s security officer at the time, the police had to send the request to a generic email address normally used when reporting posts.
 
When Telegram failed to cooperate, the police used evidence from other platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and virtual currency exchange operators, to catch Cho Ju-bin and other perpetrators.
 
In May 2024, news of another case involving the distribution of illegal deepfake pornography through Telegram by Seoul National University (SNU) graduates broke. The graduates used deepfake technology to create sexually explicit videos based off of photos of their former classmates from yearbooks and social media and distributed them through Telegram channels.
 
At the time, police were indifferent to reports from victims, saying that the Telegram server was located abroad, making it difficult to identify perpetrators. However, through undercover investigations, victims and civic activists managed to identify the perpetrators, information which was then used to kick off police investigations.
 
Since then, additional revelations have come out about Telegram channels made for sharing illegal deepfake nude images of women at more than 70 universities nationwide. 

Despite its frequent use as a conduit for digital sex crimes, Telegram still manages to hide from the law. The so-called “Nth Room Prevention Act” — an amendment to the Telecommunications Business Act and the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection — which has been in effect since December 2021, does not cover Telegram. 
 
While the law requires internet service providers to take measures such as removing sexually offensive material, Telegram is exempt from the law since chat rooms on Telegram are strictly “private.”

By Lim Jae-woo, staff reporter

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