The Doctor's Room on Telegram
Between 2018 and 2020, operators of encrypted Telegram networks in South Korea blackmailed dozens of women and girls into producing sexual videos that were sold to paying users for cryptocurrency. In November 2020, a Seoul court sentenced the ringleader, Cho Ju-bin, to 40 years in prison.
A network built on blackmail
The abuse operated through a set of chat rooms on the encrypted messaging service Telegram, collectively known in South Korea as the “Nth Room.” The most notorious of them was the “Doctor's Room,” run by an operator using the screen name “Baksa,” a Korean word for a doctorate holder or expert, later identified as Cho Ju-bin, according to CNN.
Human Rights Watch, in a March 2020 statement, described how the operators lured victims. According to the organization, the perpetrators obtained explicit footage “by luring women and girls under false pretenses, including offering employment, and gathered their names and contact details, then used the images to blackmail them into producing increasingly cruel and dehumanizing footage,” Human Rights Watch said. The group added that “major gaps in law, enforcement, and support for victims remain” in South Korea's response to digital sex crimes.
Sold for cryptocurrency
Access to the material was not free. Content was distributed through the Telegram rooms and could be viewed only after payment in cryptocurrency, with tiered levels of membership depending on how much a user paid, according to a summary of the case compiled by Wikipedia, drawing on court records and news reporting. The Doctor's Room alone had a confirmed membership of about 15,000 people, and the victims' images were shared and sold to hundreds of thousands of anonymous accounts.
Prosecutors said Cho and several accomplices had produced sexually abusive videos of at least 74 victims, 16 of them minors, and distributed them to users who paid to watch, according to Al Jazeera. The total number of victims later confirmed across the linked networks reached at least 103, including 26 minors, according to the compiled case record.
Forty years, and a legal reckoning
On Nov. 26, 2020, the Seoul Central District Court sentenced Cho to 40 years in prison, falling short of the life term prosecutors had sought, according to Al Jazeera. “The accused has widely distributed sexually abusive content that he created by luring and threatening many victims,” the court said, according to Al Jazeera. Cho was found guilty of violating laws protecting minors from sexual abuse and of operating a criminal organization to produce and sell abusive videos for profit.
The case, exposed in early 2020, prompted a wider crackdown. South Korean authorities pursued scores of other operators and participants, and in April the National Assembly passed a string of laws to make digital sex crimes easier to prosecute, including provisions under which those who possess, buy, store or watch illegally filmed sexual content can be sentenced to up to three years in prison, according to Al Jazeera.
A pattern that outlasted one court
Researchers who study technology-enabled abuse note that the Doctor's Room combined three features that recur in image-based sexual crimes: encrypted channels that shield offenders, payment rails that monetize the material, and blackmail that traps victims in silence. South Korea's own experience showed the pattern did not end with a single verdict; the “Nth Room” name was later invoked by fresh networks that surfaced after the 2020 prosecutions, according to reporting collected in the case record. Human-rights monitors continue to press governments and platforms to close the enforcement gaps the case exposed.