The Sankei Shimbun report on South Korea’s “Nth Room case” revealed an organized digital sex crime in which many of both the perpetrators and victims were in their teens and twenties. More than 220 people have been caught so far, exposing the abnormal darkness deep within South Korean society.

May 11, 2020
More than 220 people connected to the case have so far been caught one after another, and young people in their teens and twenties, like suspect Cho, account for more than 70 percent.
South Korea, which was once a tributary state of China, has been a Confucian society and, at the same time, has adhered to the civil service examination system.
Moreover, together with the tradition of the yangban, there is among Koreans a temperament that dislikes working by the sweat of one’s brow.
As a result, to put it in the most extreme terms, South Korea has become a society in which getting a job at Samsung is everything.
At the same time, I have previously pointed out the abnormality of South Korea’s examination competition, the enormous number of sex crimes such as assaults against women committed by those who fall out of that system, that is, by the younger generation, and the fact that Japanese mass media such as the Asahi Shimbun and NHK, for some reason, do not report these obvious facts at all.
The article published today in the Sankei Shimbun, now the most decent newspaper not only in Japan but in the world, under the title “Digital Sex Crime Shakes South Korea,” proved that my argument was entirely correct and that South Korea is a country of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
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As the spread of the novel coronavirus continues around the world, a case that could be called an “organized digital sex crime” has shaken South Korean society.
It is the so-called “Nth Room case,” in which videos of sexual abuse and assault against women were made available for viewing by an unspecified large number of people on social networking services.
South Korean police have so far caught more than 220 people and arrested more than 30, including the principal offender.
The fact that many of both the perpetrators and the victims were in their teens and twenties has further deepened the shock.
According to local media such as Hankyoreh and JoongAng Ilbo, the stage of the incident was chat rooms, spaces where an unspecified large number of people interact, set up on Telegram, a highly confidential communications app born in Russia.
A person using the handle name “Gatgat” opened “Nth Rooms,” numbered from 1 to 8, with n meaning number.
On Twitter, he skillfully deceived women, made them send nude photographs, then threatened them by saying, “I will expose this to your friends,” placed them under his control, and streamed scenes of sexual assault and other acts inside the chat rooms.
Gatgat entrusted the operation of the “Nth Rooms” to another person and disappeared, but many similar “rooms” carrying out similar acts appeared.
Among them, the one with particularly high maliciousness was the so-called “Doctor’s Room,” operated by suspect Cho Ju-bin, 25, known as “Doctor,” who was arrested in March this year.
From around September last year, he intensified his activities and shared sexual videos in multiple chat rooms.
He also filmed videos of grotesque acts, such as making women who could not resist carve the words “Doctor” and “slave” into their bodies with knives, and he received usage fees from those wishing to enter, ranging from 250,000 won, about 22,000 yen, to 1.5 million won, about 130,000 yen, in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies according to the extremity of the content.
The highest-ranking rooms used an app with even greater anonymity than Telegram.
Among those viewing the rooms were people called “employees” who cooperated with suspect Cho, and they jointly managed the rooms.
When victimized women tried to escape or when financial problems arose, these employees reportedly threatened them by telephone and other means.
The situation became public when some media outlets began campaign-style reporting in November last year based on interviews with victims.
More than 220 people connected to the case have so far been caught one after another, and young people in their teens and twenties, like suspect Cho, account for more than 70 percent.
On the victims’ side as well, among the 58 people whose personal information has been confirmed, the majority are teenagers and people in their twenties: 30 in their teens and 22 in their twenties.
In South Korea, except in principle for serious crimes such as murder, the names and photographs of suspects are not made public.
Suspect Cho was also anonymous at first, but two million petitions flooded into the “national petition” system, through which citizens submit opinions to the government online.
For the first time in a sexual violence case, his identity was made public.
At the end of March, a judge in charge of the trial of one of the defendants was criticized as being “lenient toward sex crimes” and was replaced.
Including the period of Gatgat, the total number of people who viewed the series of chat rooms is said to have reached 260,000.
President Moon Jae-in declared that the case would be thoroughly investigated and that victims would be supported.
South Korean police are pursuing the whereabouts of Gatgat, the creator of the rooms.
(Misaki Owatari)
Regarding this man using the handle name “Gatgat,” I sense the same kind of evil as that of the man who, as readers know, has persistently continued since June 2011 to commit truly unbelievable criminal acts against this column, including lowering search numbers and impersonation, through outrageous attacks.