Police to intensify crackdown on spycam networks
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CEO of Hankook Mirae Technology Yang Jin-ho leaves Suwon Nambu Police Station in Gyeonggi Province on Nov. 16, after the police turned him over to prosecution. Yang faces various charges including violation of the Information Communications Network Act and the Sexual Violence Act. / Yonhap
By Kim Jae-heun
By Kim Jae-heun
Police said Thursday they will begin a 100-day intensive crackdown on voyeur video distribution networks early next year to eradicate illegally taken and distributed obscene online content.
The intensive control has gathered momentum after the police confirmed that Yang Jin-ho, the CEO of Hankook Mirae Technology who was arrested for abusing employees, has been operating a million-dollar cartel of obscene materials from production to distribution mainly through file-sharing websites.
The 100-day crackdown comes only about a month after another special crackdown on online sex crimes that began in August. During the previous crackdown, police nabbed 53 operators of 40 online storage websites, along with 350 heavy uploaders of illegal content such as voyeur videos and revenge porn.
However, the police said only catching the file-sharing website operators cannot prevent spycam footage and other illegally recorded content from spreading until they break down the existing profit model.
“Storage site operators have been conspiring with heavy uploaders of obscene content and the uploading programmers to share the profits by professionally spreading the content. Some pornography businesses have systematically disturbed police investigations and alerted their partners when the crackdowns took place,” an officer at the Korea National Police Agency said.
The police added that such sites must filter out spycam materials but they fail to do so properly, and some of the file-sharing website operators even run monitoring companies that provide filter software supposedly for that purpose.
“We have seen file-sharing site operators refraining from uploading spycam content during police crackdowns. But they start uploading obscene materials again when we halt it for a moment and public anger subsides,” the police officer said.
The new crackdown is aimed at completely shutting out voyeur video distribution on online storage sites. The police formed a taskforce together with the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family and the Korean Communications Commission.
They will urge file-sharing site operators to remove all illegal content from the platforms while staging regular joint inspections. Those caught spreading such content will face punishment ranging from fines to heavy taxes and business license cancellations.
In November, the police investigated Yang and found out he not only owned the file-sharing platforms WeDisk and Filenori, where voyeur videos were being uploaded and shared by thousands of members, but also owned a filtering company named Mureka, as well as a digital undertaker agency that removes such content upon request from spycam victims.
Yang allegedly made 7 billion won by distributing 52,000 obscene videos, including voyeur videos recorded by spycams, colluding with heavy uploaders of voyeur videos and sharing profits with them.