Korean women have uncovered a nationwide deepfake ring on Telegram. Initial reports came from Korean journalist Lee Hoo-Rin for an outlet called Newstapa. As this story is still developing the validity of these origins is still only speculative.
The main chatrooms at the heart of this story are ones for generating AI deepfakes. Once group chat was found to have 220,000 users.
Several Telegram deep fake rings have been found to be attached to university campuses. Three months ago a Telegram deep fake group was found at Seoul National University. Another has been exposed at Inha University recently.
Further groups have been exposed that are dedicated to men taking compromising photos of women. Others centre on documenting and sharing footage of women being sexually assaulted.
On Tuesday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol urged a comprehensive investigation into digital sex crimes following media reports that sexually explicit deepfake images and videos of South Korean women were frequently shared in Telegram chatrooms.
These reports emerged around the same time as the arrest of Pavel Durov, the Russian-born founder of Telegram, who was detained over the weekend as part of a French investigation into child pornography, drug trafficking, and fraud on the encrypted messaging platform.
What is a deepfake?
A deepfake is a pornographic image that has been modified with artificial intelligence to use the image of another person. This is linked to the crime of revenge porn, which is the distribution of explicit content of a person without their consent.
Deepfakes are becoming increasingly common, and as technology develops, increasingly realistic.
The technology used to create deep fakes was initially developed to aid video editors make more seamless transitions. It has since been misused for the purpose of making deepfakes.
In Korea the majority of deepfakes are made by men under the age of 18. Data from the Korean police shows that 75.8% of people under investigation for producing deepfakes were teenagers. A further 20% were in their 20s, meaning that males under 30 comprise 95.8% of all deep fake production in Korea.
Recently in Busan, a city in the southern part of South Korea, four middle school students were found to be stockpiling illicit modified images of female teachers and school girls.
Is deepfake crime on the rise in Korea?
Online deepfake sex crimes have significantly increased, with South Korean police reporting 297 cases in the first seven months of the year, up from 180 last year and nearly double the cases recorded in 2021, when data collection began.
The majority of suspects are teenagers and young adults in their 20s, according to police. A viral analysis by Hankyoreh, a Korean newspaper, highlighted Telegram channels where deepfakes of female students, ranging from university to middle school, were being circulated.
The Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union recently reported instances where school students were victims of deepfakes, prompting a call for the education ministry to investigate. Additionally, the Military Sexual Abuse Victim Support Center has identified explicit deepfakes targeting female military personnel in Telegram chatrooms.
Telegram’s reputation in South Korea has been marred for years, particularly after it was revealed that an online sexual blackmail ring operated primarily through its chatrooms. The ring’s leader, Cho Ju-bin, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2020 for coercing at least 74 women, including 16 minors, into producing increasingly degrading sexual content.
Under South Korea’s Sexual Violence Prevention and Victims Protection Act, creating and distributing sexually explicit deepfakes is punishable by up to five years in prison or a fine of 50 million won (rougly £3,000).
A report by South Korean Supreme Court Justice Lee Suk-yeon, referencing data from the U.S.-based security startup Home Security Heroes, disclosed that the number of deepfake videos distributed globally in 2023 reached 95,820, a staggering 550% increase since 2019. Notably, 98% of these videos were identified as deepfake pornography, with 99% of the targets being women, and 53% of those targeted were South Korean singers and actresses.
Efforts to combat deepfake sex crimes have proven largely ineffective. Between June 2020 and April 2024, the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC) managed to remove only 2.3% of explicit fake videos. Furthermore, in 2021, only 157 of South Korea’s 258 police stations had specialised cyber investigation teams, with each investigator handling an average of 200 cases.
What’s the wider context?
South Korea has been undergoing one of the most stark social divisions along the lines of gender of any developed country. Due to the rife abuse of women in the country, many Korean women have joined together to form the 4B Movement.
The 4B Movement is a form of feminist protest against gendered expectations in Korea. Those who belong to the movement abstain from having sex with men, marrying, having children, and dating men.
The movement has been growing since 2019 and has gained international attention, particularly in online communities.
Simultaneously South Korea has become a central hub for a rising number of incels, and men in the country now lean significantly further to the right wing than Korean women. A 2021 survey found that 79% of Korean men in their 20s consider themselves victims of ‘reverse discrimination’.
Similar trends are cropping up in other East Asian nations, particularly in Japan and China. South Korea and Japan are the worst performing nations in the Economist’s glass ceiling index, indicating that these countries have the smallest amount of women in positions of power compared to other countries on the index (all are developed nations).
Many consider the rapid acceleration of women joining the workforce, economic decline, and falling birth rates to be compounding the already ingrained misogyny present in East Asia. In China additional pressures come from the skewed gender balance in the country. This is due to sex-selective abortions, femicide, and abandonment of baby girls during China’s one baby policy period.
What’s next for Korea?
An investigation from KoreaPro found a Telegram chat with over 400 members, in this chat at least four girls were exposed and private information such as date of birth, addresses for their homes and schools, and government ID numbers were shared.
The sheer volume of men involved in this ongoing case necessitates a national response. Korea’s growing gender divisions are going to take a long time, and possibly even generations, to address.
In April, following a deepfake video of President Yoon Suk-yeol insulting his government spread online, the Korean government amended the Public Official Election Act to ban the use of deepfakes in political campagins.
Further legislative changes are needed to protect Korean women and girls who are disproportionately the victims of deepfakes.
Until then, this story will continue to unfold.
