Korea’s ‘Nth Room’ case, explained

Content warning: This article describes sexual abuse. Please take care while reading.

The Nth Room refers to eight Telegram app chat rooms run by a South Korean admin with the username Godgod, where for at least two years, beginning around 2018, sexually explicit content was shared, some of which involved middle school-aged children.

The Netflix documentary Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror, streaming now, tells the story of how South Korean journalists, cybercrime investigators, and two intrepid college students brought those behind the Nth Room and other similar Telegram chat rooms to justice, in what’s now known as the Nth Room case, one of South Korea’s most infamous sex abuse scandals.

Before the Nth Room, legal penalties for similar cybercrimes in South Korea were relatively lax. In the aftermath, South Korean laws were strengthened to protect victims of sexual exploitation online, as the victims with the help of the government regained control of their lives.

What happened to the Nth Room?

In 2019, the South Korean newspaper The Hankyoreh, tipped off by an informant, launched an investigation led by journalist Kim Wan into encrypted Telegram chat rooms where extreme, sexually explicit, and often abusive content was sold and shared.

As Kim would learn, the Nth Room network, each identified with ordinal numbers one through eight, was not the only Telegram chat room involved in the case. The Doctor’s Room, a similar South Korean chat room run by an admin known as Baksa, translating in Korean to “the Doctor,” was exposed through Wan’s work.

Not long after journalist Kim Wan launched his investigation, he, too, was targeted by those behind the Telegram chat rooms, as his personal information, including pictures of his family, as well as threats to him and his loved ones, were posted on the network.

Nth and Doctor’s room victims were often contacted on Twitter, telling them their private photos had been leaked online. Once the women and girls followed the link provided, their personal information was captured and then used as ransom, and in return, they created and uploaded graphic content on their own.

Baksa and the Doctor’s Room used similar tactics to find his victims, but also lured some with the promise of high-paying modeling jobs which never materialized. If women and girls didn’t comply, those behind these chat rooms threatened to release the content they made to schools, friends, and family.

Those who used the Telegram chat rooms paid with cryptocurrency in different membership tiers costing as much as $1,200 for access to the most extreme content.

One victim later told CBS Radio in Korean (via Quartz), “I developed bipolar disorder and depression. I felt like I was being stalked. I couldn’t let anyone recognize me so I bundled up my whole face and body whenever I went outside, even in summer.”

The Nth Room aftermath

Thanks in part to Wan’s investigation, and amid widespread public outcry, by 2020, Baksa — legal name Cho Ju-bin — was arrested and sentenced to 42 years for his crimes. As for Godgod, or Moon Hyung-wook, he was sentenced to 34 years for similar offenses. Both men were in their 20s.

Meanwhile, an additional 3,757 people involved in the case were taken into custody, many of whom were also in their 20s. Among those arrested, 245 people were sentenced, and hundreds of thousands of people accessed content through the chat rooms, according to some estimates.

Referring to the Doctor’s Room in particular, Min Gap-ryong, commissioner general of the South Korean National Police Agency, said, “‘The Doctor chat room’ incident is a cruel and shocking crime that dealt a shattering blow to the lives of children, teenagers and women. Through stringent investigation, we will put an end to the social apathy toward online sex abuse and uproot such crime from gaining a foothold in our society.”

If you know someone suffering from sexual violence, contact RAINN or the National Sexual Abuse Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.