They Called the Women ‘Cars’. German Courts Called It Rape.
On July 8, 2026, a Berlin court convicted a former doctor for helping run a Telegram network that drugged and raped women and filed its victims under code words — “cars” for the women, “fuel” for the sedatives, “driving” for the assaults. It was the latest of several 2026 verdicts to emerge from a German-based online predator ring that prosecutors say reached thousands of men.
A Berlin court on July 8 sentenced a 32-year-old former doctor, identified in line with German privacy rules as Zhiting S., to five years in prison after finding him guilty of being an accessory to rape, among other charges, in a case built on years of messages traded inside a private network on the messaging app Telegram, the Associated Press reported. Prosecutors said he had used his medical training to advise other members on which drugs could be used to sedate women before they were assaulted.
The group called itself, in its own words, a “German driving school for experts.” But the true purpose of its chats, prosecutors said, was to brag about the women members had raped and to trade tips on how to drug them, according to the Associated Press. In posts that sometimes carried photographs and video of attacks on unconscious victims, the men referred to women as “cars,” to sedatives as “fuel” and to rape as “driving,” according to court documents cited by the news agency, and called their victims “dead pigs.”
A network hidden behind code words
Investigators pored through several years of posts across roughly two dozen group chats that authorities believe served an online predator network of mainly Chinese men targeting mostly Chinese women in Germany, the Associated Press reported. At the center was a Telegram group run since 2020 with an inner circle of eight members, its outer rings reaching some 4,500 people, more than 2,000 of them active in discussing how to drug women and in trading footage of the results.
The coded vocabulary was not incidental; it was the network’s operating language, the shared euphemism that let members catalogue real assaults as if they were logging errands. Prosecutors have not said publicly how many women were victimized by the ring, and they have said the investigation remains open, meaning further arrests and additional victims are possible, according to the Associated Press.
A string of convictions
The Berlin verdict was the newest in a series. In February, a court in Frankfurt sentenced the man German authorities have described as the group’s ringleader, identified as Dapeng Z., 44, to 14 years in prison for aggravated rape, attempted murder and other offenses, and ordered that he be held in preventive detention afterward, the Associated Press reported. He was arrested in 2024 in an operation that German investigators carried out in cooperation with Chinese law enforcement, and he has appealed.
In April, a court in Munich sentenced another member, a 28-year-old man, to 11 years and three months on charges that included attempted murder and aggravated rape, according to the Associated Press. A further member had already been sentenced in Berlin the previous year to five years and nine months after prosecutors said he exchanged thousands of messages with the ringleader and coached him on filming his assaults, the news agency reported.
How the trap was set
The assaults did not begin online, but the network gave them an audience and a method. The ringleader posed as a woman on Chinese-language platforms, advertising rooms for rent to lure newly arrived Chinese female students, then drugged and raped them and filmed the attacks for the group, the Associated Press reported. What the chats added was infrastructure: a place to learn which sedatives to use, to swap footage as trophies, and to be encouraged by a crowd.
The Berlin court found that the former doctor had, in the chats, pointed to a particular sedative before an assault committed by the man later convicted in Frankfurt, though he was not the only member to offer such advice, according to the Associated Press. He was also convicted on counts of sexual coercion tied to the abuse of a partner, and his defense said it would appeal.
An investigation still open
The case adds to a growing record of encrypted group chats used not merely to share abuse but to organize it — to teach, to recruit and to normalize. Telegram, which for years positioned itself around minimal moderation and has faced mounting legal pressure in Europe over illegal content, was the space in which the German ring operated for years before investigators unraveled it, the Associated Press reported.
What the courts have described this year is a sequence that researchers of online abuse know well: a closed forum that dehumanizes a group in its very vocabulary, a membership numbering in the thousands, and real women drugged and assaulted offline while the evidence was passed around as content. The prosecutions have reached the inner circle. The wider network, authorities say, is still being counted.