Man who ran blackmail ring that sexually exploited or abused 261 victims receives life sentence in South Korea

A 33-year-old South Korean man was sentenced to life in prison Monday for running an online blackmail ring that sexually exploited or abused 261 victims, including more than a dozen minors whom he raped or assaulted, over a four-year period before his arrest in January.

The Seoul Central District Court said the severity of Kim Nok-wan’s crimes justified his “permanent isolation from society.” He sentenced 10 accomplices to prison terms ranging from two to four years in what law enforcement authorities describe as the country’s largest cybersex crime case to date.

He was the head of the so-called Vigilantes: a large-scale, pyramid-style group that blackmailed victims into producing explicit content and sharing it in online chat rooms, BBC News reported. Kim, who called himself the “shepherd” of the group, targeted both male and female victims, according to BBC News.

Beginning in August 2020, Kim targeted women posting sexually suggestive content on social media and men attempting to join secret Telegram chat rooms to share digitally manipulated sexual images of acquaintances. He threatened to expose them and forced them to recruit new victims, forming a pyramid-shaped blackmail ring on the app that produced and shared manipulated sexual images of his targets, most of whom were minors, according to details of the crimes revealed in court.

Kim raped or assaulted 16 victims, including 14 minors, and recorded videos of his crimes in 13 of those cases. He created approximately 1,700 sexually exploitative images or videos targeting about 70 victims, disseminating about 260 of them online to threaten those who refused to cooperate, and also attempted to blackmail some of the victims’ relatives and co-workers, the court said.

“[Kim Nok-wan] “He says in court that he is remorseful, but he committed countless crimes in the last four or five years,” the court said, according to BBC News. “Considering the brutality of the crimes and the lack of restitution for the victims, it is necessary to permanently isolate him from society.”

The other defendants, including five minors, knew that the victims they recruited through threats that included videos and images would face the same sexual exploitation they had suffered, but carried out the acts anyway to prevent their own images from circulating, the court said.

“The majority of the victims were children or adolescents, and it appears that they would have suffered extreme physical and psychological pain as a result of the crimes,” the court said in a statement.

“Digital sex crimes can quickly amplify victims’ harm to an irreparable level in the digital space, and once sexually exploitative materials are distributed, it is physically very difficult to completely remove them, making recovery from harm virtually impossible.”

The revelation of Kim’s crimes following his arrest in January sparked public shock and concern about the growing risk of sexual violence enabled by digital technologies. Monday’s ruling came nearly five years after the same court handed down a 40-year prison sentence for Cho Ju-bin on charges of blackmailing dozens of women, including minors, into filming sexually explicit videos and selling them to others.