This week we looked at another new news event in Korea which shook the international community, the nth room. More than 2million people have petitioned to the Korean government to fully disclose the Nth room (n번방) suspects and put them on a press photo line “텔레그램n번방 용의자 신상공개 및 포토라인.” The nth room is a chain of group chat on the Telegram platform named group 1, group 2, group 3, … etc. that suddenly became popular among dominantly male internet communities. When the chat was in risk of being investigated or exposed, the chat leader would simply ‘explode’ the chat and move on to the next one. These chats can be completely destroyed due to the Telegram platform’s policies to never release their users data and to any national agencies.
In these chats, pictures of high school girls called “slaves” during “weird postures” were uploaded. The owner of this group chat used the id “godgod” or 것것 posted the videos while the id name ‘watchman’ 와치맨 redistributed the videos to another group called 고담방. These videos included videos of girls forced to self-harm and other sexual exploitations, and even included minors. After the media’s exposure, the rooms went under the radar, but resulted in the creation of other group chats, and the most well-known group is the 박사room established by the user id 박사, which means professor. In order to enter the 박사room one have to pay a fee with crypto currency, like bitcoin or monero, and the fee varies from $250 to $1000 dollars. The owners of this rooms hack deviation accounts of women who privately posts sexual photos or nude photos on their private accounts, and aquire their personal information to blackmail them for more videos or photos to sell in the nth room. There also included videos of the owner of the groups raping their blackmailed victims, including minors.
The ‘professor’ or 박사 allegedly earned $130,000 from this activity, and threatened SBS (one of the biggest broadcasting corporation) to expose one victim per week and make them commit suicide on top of the SBS building if they aired their investigative show on this incident. On the February 9th, 16 of the nth room leaders and 50 users were arrested, and the 박사’s finance manager called Buddah was also arrested, who exposed 박사’s identity. On March 16th, 박사was arrested and revealed to be 24-year-old조주빈. It is released that around 260,000 people are known to have participated in the nth room and 10,000 people used the 박사방 (professor room).
Millions of Koreans have signed the petition to reveal the identity for anyone that have used the nth room, and this event sparked hot debates on Korean social media.
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