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SEOUL — Trolling be-
hind the anonymity afforded
by an encrypted chat app,
the man who called himself
“Baksa” pretended he was
many things: a no-holds-
barred loan shark, a private
eye for hire and a fortysome-
thing Korean with a pros-
thetic leg living outside the
law’s reach in Cambodia.
In reality he was an out-
of-work recent college grad
who’d been bedridden for a
year after a limb-length-
ening surgery to overcome
insecurities about his
height.
From his bedroom, Cho
Ju-bin, 25, spun illusions and
masterminded one of the
most notorious sex crime
schemes to shake South Ko-
rea in years. He blackmailed
dozens of young women into
providing sexually compro-
mising images and videos,
which he sold to tens of thou-
sands of his users. Author-
ities say he and his collabo-
rators, including a 16-year-
old boy, ran the operation
through secretive chat-
rooms on the app Telegram.
They hunted for prey
through social media and
reaped their profits through
the cryptocurrency bitcoin.
The case has ignited a
fierce debate in South Korea
about justice and how to ex-
act punishment for digital
sex crimes. The wide-reach-
ing scandal has again ex-
posed an underlying culture
of cavalier consumption of
material depicting sexual
abuse. Among the hundreds
being investigated as having
joined the chatrooms are po-
lice officers and elementary
school teachers.
“Because of the level of
abuse and the number of vic-
tims, collaborators and par-
ticipants, there was a collec-
tive shock to our society,”
said Lee Hyo-rin, an activist
and victim counselor with
the support group Korea Cy-
ber Sexual Violence Re-
sponse Center.
The scheme is the latest
in a series of headlines that
have roiled South Korea in
recent years involving illicit
sex videos or spy cam re-
cordings that have put the
country’s women on edge
and raised questions about
the dark side of the nation’s
much-touted internet and
smartphone infrastructure
and technological adapt-
ation. In 2019, some of the
country’s most popular K-
pop stars were investigated
and convicted of crimes re-
lated to the sharing of il-
legally recorded sexual ma-
terial, some involving wom-
en who were drugged and
raped.
Cho — who also called
himself “CEO Park” — was
sentenced to 40 years in pris-
on Thursday. Prosecutors
had sought a life term. Oth-
ers accused of conspiring
with him to recruit and
threaten the victims, adver-
tise the chatrooms and mon-
etize the profits received
sentences ranging from sev-
en to 15 years.
Police say more than 70
women, many of them mi-
nors, were lured into provid-
ing personal information
under the guise of a poten-
tial high-paying liaison with
an older man and then
blackmailed into providing
sexually explicit material to
Cho and others who would
threaten to tell family and
friends or post on social me-
dia.
Those videos and images
were then fed into chat-
rooms that operated like
a multilevel marketing
scheme, in which members
had to post their own porno-
graphic images or pay fees
up to $1,300 for access to
more exclusive chatrooms.
When some of the operators
were arrested in late 2019,others stepped up to take
their place and new chat-
rooms cropped up.
Cho mimicked chat-
rooms he’d seen on
Telegram. But he styled
himself as a ruthless purvey-
or with access to a cache of
more extreme videos to at-
tract paying users, he said in
court testimony.
“My aim was, how can I be
even more extreme, and get
more attention?” he testified
this week at a co-conspira-
tor’s trial, speaking with the
composure of an entrepre-
neur discussing a start-up
venture. He has appalled the
country as a man who ap-
pears as both an average col-
lege student and a criminal
who intimidated his victims
into torture or self-mutila-
tion and urged his cronies to
commit rape. At a previous
hearing for his sentencing,
he tearfully apologized and
said he accepted responsi-
bility for his crimes.
One of the victims wrote
an anonymous letter to per-
petrators published in the
newspaper Hankyoreh, re-
counting how fearful she felt
being threatened by invisi-
ble abusers blackmailing
her from beyond computer
and smartphone screens.
“When I saw your faces
being unmasked one by one,
it truly hit me that my life
had been destroyed,” she
wrote. “Behind your online
veil, you seemed like fic-
tional figures. I wished it wasall fiction and my reality was
a passing dream.”
Attorneys for the victims
argued in court that the
young women live with the
anxiety that the videos and
images they were coerced
into creating would be re-
produced and live indefi-
nitely on the web.
“I hope their punishment
is never-ending, the way my
pain will never end,” one vic-
tim wrote in a letter read out
in court by an attorney. “Did
they even think there were
human beings just like them
on the other end of the vide-
os?” wrote another woman,
who said she keeps her hair
long and wears heavy make-
up to shield her face, out of
fear that she might get rec-
ognized from the images.
Outrage over the case,
which earlier this year
eclipsed the COVID-19 pan-demic in news cycles and
conversations in South Ko-
rea, led to the passage of a
law increasing punishments
for those who possess or
view illegally created sexual
material. The law will also
hold some websites liable for
hosting such content, even
though the app Telegram re-
mains out of reach because it
is based overseas.
Shin Jin-hee, a publicly
appointed attorney repre-
senting many of the victims,
has dealt with similar crimes
in recent years but said
Cho’s operation was on an-
other level. In addition to
charges of distributing child
pornography and illegal ma-
terial, prosecutors have also
charged the defendants with
running a criminal syndi-
cate, a move Shin said was
unprecedented and re-
flected the magnitude of thecase in the public’s eye.
“The rapid distribution,
the systematic organization
was to another degree of se-
verity,” she said. “The tech-
nology is developing so fast
... and the policies and insti-
tutions can’t keep up.”
An attorney for the 16-
year-old defendant, who was
in high school at the time of
his alleged crimes, also
blamed technology for lead-
ing her young client astray.
His name has not been made
public.
“He was a kid who was
good at computers,” the at-
torney said in final argu-
ments. “The fault may be
with adults who allowed
children to use smartphones
and the internet without
proper restrictions and cre-
ated this illegal content.”
Lee, the activist and
counselor, said that as the
digital native generation
comes of age, many of its
members are probably ex-
posed to abusive, criminal
material at a young age and
become inured to it. Some
online harassment cases her
group was consulted on in-
volved elementary school
students, she said.
“When it comes to online
sex crimes, both the victims
and perpetrators are getting
younger and younger,” she
said. “If you’re well versed in
the web platforms, anyone
can do it, and there is the sol-
id demand to support it.”
“We know it’s unaccept-
able in the real world, but
those universal standards
don’t seem to apply in this
online space,” she said.‘Sextortion’ case roils South Korea
Jobless college grad
blackmailed young
women into providing
compromising images
that he sold online.
CHO JU-BIN,center, is accused of masterminding a sex crimes scheme through chatrooms on the Telegram
app. His case has ignited a fierce debate in South Korea about how to exact punishment for digital sex crimes.Kim Hong-jiPool PhotoBy Victoria Kim
NEW DELHI — India’s
ruling Hindu nationalist
party has approved legisla-
tion in the country’s most
populous state that lays out
a prison term of up to 10
years for anyone found
guilty of using marriage to
force someone to change re-
ligion.
The new law in the state
of Uttar Pradesh was passed
Tuesday and follows a cam-
paign by Prime Minister
Narendra Modi’s Hindu na-
tionalist Bharatiya Janata
Party against interfaith
marriages. The party de-
scribes such marriages as
“love jihad,” an unproven
conspiracy theory used by
party leaders and Hindu
hard-line groups to accuse
Muslim men of converting
Hindu women by marriage.
Under the legislation, a
couple belonging to two dif-
ferent religions will have to
give two months’ notice to a
district magistrate before
getting married. The couple
will be allowed to marry only
if the official finds no objec-
tions.
Uttar Pradesh govern-
ment minister Siddharth
Nath Singh said prison
terms of up to 10 years would
stop unlawful conversions
and provide justice for wom-
en.
Uttar Pradesh is the third
Indian state ruled by Modi’s
party, after Haryana and
Madhya Pradesh, to ap-
prove such legislation to
check what Hindu national-
ist leaders call forced and
unlawful religious conver-
sions.
Earlier, the state’s top
elected leader, Yogi Ad-
ityanah, a monk regarded by
some as a Hindu extremist,
said at a public meeting that
those waging “love jihad”
should either refrain from it
or be prepared to die.
Hindu hard-line groups
have long accused minority
Muslims of taking over the
country by persuading
Hindu women to marry
them and convert to Islam.
Although India’s Consti-
tution is secular and pro-
vides protection to all faiths,
the issue of “love jihad” has
gripped headlines and pit-
ted Modi’s party leaders
against secular activists.
India’s investigating
agencies and courts have,
however, rejected the “love
jihad” theory, which many
see as part of an anti-Muslim
agenda by Modi’s party.
Under Modi, India has seen a
rising tide of Hindu nation-
alism.
On Tuesday, a court in
Uttar Pradesh heard a case
of interfaith marriage and
said that “interference in a
personal relationship would
constitute a serious en-
croachment into the right to
freedom of choice of the two
individuals.”
The court’s ruling came
after a Muslim man was ac-
cused of forcibly converting
his Hindu partner.
India is a predominantly
Hindu country, with Mus-
lims making up about 14% of
its more than 1.3 billion peo-ple. Hindu hard-line groups
also oppose conversions to
Christianity and have vowed
to continue trying to prevent
interfaith relationships.
Critics of Modi — an
avowed Hindu nationalist —
say India’s tradition of diver-
sity and secularism has
come under attack since his
party won power in 2014 and
returned for a second term
in 2019. They accuse the
party of fanning religious
passions and presiding over
religious intolerance and
sometimes even violence.
The party denies the accusa-
tion.
But a mood of fear, anger
and disenchantment is
growing among ordinary In-
dian Muslims. They say
Modi and his party are
slowly disenfranchising
them, leaving the communi-
ty facing a future as second-
class citizens.
On Monday, police regis-
tered a case against two Net-
flix executives after a leader
of Modi’s party objected to
scenes in the series “A Suit-
able Boy,” in which a Hindu
girl and a Muslim boy kiss
against the backdrop of
what appears to be a Hindu
temple.
The police complaint was
registered in Madhya
Pradesh state for allegedly
offending the religious senti-
ments of Hindus. Many Indi-
ans on Twitter demanded a
boycott of Netflix and called
for the series to be taken off
the platform.
A Netflix India spokes-
person declined to com-
ment.Indian state’s conversion law
targets interfaith marriages
associated press