Spycam is big money operation in S. Korea's porn industry
Women's groups call for fair and thorough investigations of spycam and online storage platforms, called "webhards" in Korean, in front of the National Police Agency headquarters, Seoul, Friday. Yonhap
Police starts 100-day special crackdown on spycam content online
By Lee Suh-yoon
Secretly filming women in motel rooms or toilet stalls to upload online as “porn” is a multimillion-dollar business operation in Korea.
According to some recent media reports, online storage platforms here rake in tens of millions of dollars a year – partly by allowing, even encouraging, its heavy uploaders to share spycam content.
Online storage sites have become breeding grounds for the dissemination of voyeur video content over the years. In Korea, spycam footage can be bought for just around 100 won ($0.10).
Under labels like “domestic porn” or more recently “Chinese porn” to escape censorship, voyeur videos are widely distributed throughout these platforms.
Recently, amid stronger censorship and public outrage against spycams that led to massive women's protests, several big online storage platforms have removed much of their voyeur video content – for now.
“We still find some from time to time, under different names and disguises,” said Park Soo-yeon, head of Digital Sexual Crime Out (DSO), an NGO that aids victims of voyeur videos. “But the platforms still provide tens of thousands of videos that look like voyeur videos but are somehow copyrighted. We cannot report those without risking being sued unless the victims speak up first.”
There are around 40 online storage platforms in Korea. Before the strengthened government censorship last year, a single ID on one of these sites tracked by the DSO uploaded around 1,000 voyeur videos a day.
The uploaders are typically supplied these video clips from “mass producers,” some of whom secretly film drunk sex partners in motel rooms in a systematic manner – the reason why only the male partner's face is blurred.
Over 90 percent of victims unwillingly featured in such voyeur videos are women.
With their sexual dignity and privacy violated, and fearing that close friends or relatives might see the clips, some victims commit suicide. But the voyeur videos continue to circulate even after their deaths, with titles such as “posthumous work.”
Some victims seek help from agencies that permanently remove all clips featuring them from the internet. But a local media report even showed that two of the biggest online storage platforms actually collected money from the victims themselves by running their own such agencies for a fee of around 550,000 won ($490) every six months.
The primary reason why the voyeur video industry has flourished is its high return and lenient punishment, according to the DSO.
Top uploaders on such platforms can earn over 100 million won a month, according to some reports. Even when arrested, however, they can usually get off with a fine as low as 50,000 won ($45).
After these recent revelations of spycam content and the underground voyeur video industry, almost 98,000 people signed a Cheong Wa Dae website petition, calling on the government to do more to crack down on online storage platforms and enforce stronger punishment in the future.
“To make regulation of online storage platforms possible, the distributors must also be made accountable and the downloaders punished, too, like the laws protecting children from sex crimes,” the petition read.
“The government's response will determine whether the victims, numbering in hundreds, thousands, or maybe tens of thousands, can go back to their ordinary lives, or be abandoned to the voyeur video industry.”
On Monday, the National Police Agency announced plans to create a special investigative team to crack down on sexual violence and shaming on the internet, most notably spycam content.
For the next 100 days, the investigations will focus on 30 online storage platforms, 216 porn sites, 29 male-dominated online communities and 257 heavy uploader IDs provided by women's rights groups.
According to the most recent available data from the police, 5,185 spycam crimes were reported in 2016, about 3.4 times more than 2011.