The Most Systematic Digital Sexual Exploitation in Korea
Content warning: this essay discusses sexual exploitation, coercion, and violence.
In March 2020, South Korean society came to a halt before a single name. Cho Joo-bin.
The operator of the Telegram “Doctor’s Room.”
The ringleader of a criminal organization that sexually exploited more than 74 women.
He was sentenced to 42 years in prison, and with additional charges, he ended up serving a total of 47 years and 4 months. His scheduled release is in 2067. By then, he will be in his late seventies.
Telegram’s “Doctor’s Room”?
The story does not begin with Cho Joo-bin.
A man using the nickname “GodGod,” Moon Hyung-wook, had been creating sexual exploitation chat rooms on Telegram since the second half of 2018. Because the rooms were named Room 1, Room 2, and so on, they came to be called the “Nth Rooms.”
Cho Joo-bin saw this structure, copied it, and upgraded it.
From May 2019 to February 2020, Cho Joo-bin operated the Telegram Doctor’s Room under the nickname “Doctor.” His method was as follows.
He posted advertisements on Twitter for “high-paying part-time jobs, 2 to 3 million won a day.” To women who responded, he asked for their ID cards, addresses, and family contact information under the pretext of “sending the payment.” Then he demanded nude photos.
The moment the photos arrived, the blackmail began.
“If you don’t do something worse, I’ll distribute them.”
The escalation did not stop.
The victims had to personally carry out extremely sadistic and humiliating acts with their own bodies, film them on camera, and send them to Cho Joo-bin. It started with carving the word “slave” into their bodies with knives or pens, and escalated to increasingly extreme sexual acts.
In some cases, accomplices directly met the victims and committed actual sexual assault, and Cho Joo-bin himself received an additional five years for personally raping a minor.
There were at least 74 victims.
At least 16 of them were minors.
The actual number was likely higher.
More than 130 million won in cryptocurrency profits were seized.
How Did He Acquire Power?
What was distinctive about Cho Joo-bin was not only the brutality of the crime.
It was the fact that he built a system.
He started alone. But among the paying members of the Doctor’s Room, he selected those who were more greedy or wanted to participate more actively and promoted them into accomplices.
Kang Hoon, age 19, known as “Buta,” became the financier.
Lee Won-ho, age 19, an active-duty soldier known as “Igiya,” handled promotion.
Nam Kyung-eup, age 29, known as “D.I,” directly carried out victim luring and blackmail.
Accomplices who had served as social service workers illegally accessed public institution systems and looked up victims’ personal information.
He operated 38 rooms at the same time and divided roles among them. The flow of finding victims, producing material, distributing it, and withdrawing money functioned like a pipeline.
This is why prosecutors applied the charge of “criminal organization.” In South Korea, this was effectively the first time that this charge was properly applied to a sexual crime.
The profiles of the accomplices were mostly similar. Late teens to early twenties. People who became paying members with their parents’ money.
Not the type to invest in themselves for the future, but people drawn to immediate pleasure and small amounts of money.
Cho Joo-bin induced loyalty by sharing some of the profits and granting them higher status inside the rooms. In a sense, he grew the organization through leverage without initial capital.
The source of that leverage, however, was blackmail, sexual exploitation, and “conscience.”
How Was He Arrested?
Cho Joo-bin was not caught because of one brave report from a particular victim.
Two anonymous college students known as “The Flame Tracking Group” infiltrated Telegram rooms themselves starting in July 2019 and collected evidence. They reported it to the Cyber Investigation Unit of the Gangwon Provincial Police Agency, and the Hankyoreh newspaper began investigative reporting.
The police traced cryptocurrency transaction records in reverse and, with the cooperation of domestic exchanges, found the link from Cho Joo-bin’s wallet address to his real name and bank account.
Cho Joo-bin was arrested at his home in Incheon on March 16, 2020. His identity was disclosed on March 25.
Until two weeks before his arrest, he had been confidently saying inside Telegram:
“This country doesn’t investigate.”
The two shields he trusted, Telegram’s encryption and cryptocurrency’s anonymity, were both imperfect.
Anyone could enter Telegram if they knew the link, and cryptocurrency operated on a public ledger called the blockchain. The moment it was converted into cash, traces were left behind.
It was a structure in which, if you tracked it hard enough, it was not the case that you absolutely could not get caught.
Why Was Cho Joo-bin Larger Than “GodGod”?
Interestingly, Cho Joo-bin received more and longer media attention than the “original” he had copied, GodGod.
Moon Hyung-wook, the original GodGod, who received a confirmed sentence of 34 years, and Cho Joo-bin were almost the same in terms of “pure desire.” But the way that desire operated was completely different.
Moon Hyung-wook was centered on sexual pleasure. He forced 21 victims into direct and extreme sadistic acts, but he was conservative about money. He accepted profits only in the form of gift certificates and used almost none of them.
The reason was simple:
“Because I might get caught.”
When a room grew too large, he handed it over to someone else and left. He was a conservative operator whose top priority was safety.
Cho Joo-bin was different.
For him, sexual exploitation was a tool. His core desires were money, power, and domination as a system.
He operated 38 rooms at once, assigned roles to accomplices, created a tiered entrance-fee system in cryptocurrency, and managed the “Doctor” brand.
He was a platform entrepreneur. It was just that the product on that platform was human suffering.
If Moon Hyung-wook was closer to “let me enjoy this alone and stay safe,” Cho Joo-bin was closer to “let me turn this into a business and rule over it.”
From the same seed of desire, entirely different trees had grown.
What Was His Private Life Like?
What was Cho Joo-bin’s private life like?
Various documentaries and media outlets revealed a substantial part of it. Looking at his background, a strange duality appears.
He graduated from the Department of Information and Communication at Inha Technical College with a GPA of 4.17. He worked as a student newspaper reporter and personally wrote articles related to sexual violence prevention.
After graduation, he worked at an NGO related to volunteer work as the head of the disability support team. He was “Teacher Joobin” to children in an orphanage.
He also gave advice on sex crime concerns on portal sites. He even advised people to “report it.”
During the day, he took care of children in an orphanage.
At night, he ran the Doctor’s Room.
There is a pattern that appears here.
Student newspaper reporter, NGO team leader, “Doctor” of the Doctor’s Room. All of them are structures in which he stands at the top of a hierarchy.
He lied to his military comrades that he attended Inha University, a four-year university, and he tried to transfer but failed. He had a strong academic inferiority complex.
He was the kind of person who, rather than being the tail of a dragon in a big organization, chose to be the head of a snake in a small one.
And that snake kept growing.
The Law Changed
In April and May 2020, seven bills collectively called the “Nth Room Prevention Act” passed the National Assembly.
The core changes were as follows.
Merely viewing or possessing illegal sexual exploitation material became punishable. The term “child and youth pornography” was changed to “child and youth sexual exploitation material.” The production and distribution of deepfake videos became subject to punishment, and the age for statutory rape of minors was raised from 13 to 16.
Internet service providers were given the obligation to technically block and delete illegal sexual exploitation material.
All of these changes came from a single case.
More precisely, a single case made it impossible to continue ignoring problems that already existed.
And the moment this case erupted coincided exactly with March 2020, when South Korean society was first beginning to be trapped indoors because of COVID-19.
It was precisely at that moment, when people were spending more time online and consuming more news, that this case exploded.
At the time, did human beings perhaps feel the shock that “the world is going terribly wrong”?
One Hypothesis: He Was Within the Allowable Range
One possible hypothesis to consider about Cho Joo-bin is that he was a person “within the allowable range.”
His school years, college grades, NGO activity, counseling volunteer work, all of these fall within the spectrum of ordinary people. The tendency to enjoy putting on an armband and wielding petty authority is also common.
Even if someone has a disposition to derive pleasure from control and domination, there are many people who remain within the range socially tolerated.
Cho Joo-bin probably classified a certain type of people, specifically “women trying to make money easily,” very clearly.
And he may have attached a moral judgment to that classification:
“Women like this deserve what happens to them.”
That judgment then becomes a license for action. It is transformed into the logic that “whatever I do to them is acceptable.”
This is the hypothesis that a person who is almost identical to other human beings in almost every respect, except for a single altered perspective, can do such things.
Another Hypothesis: He Had Already Crossed the Line
Another hypothesis is that he was a person who had already crossed the allowable range from the start.
His exemplary outward image, a GPA in the 4-point range, NGO team leader, student newspaper reporter, counseling volunteer, was not proof of normality but rather a sophisticated camouflage designed to hide his abnormal desire for control and secure a social alibi.
He did not become a monster only after classifying certain women as beings who “deserved” what happened to them.
Extreme tendencies and antisocial desires that took pleasure in thoroughly instrumentalizing and destroying others were already present inside him.
He merely chose “women trying to make money easily” as prey that was easiest to handle and easiest to use in justifying himself, in order to safely discharge that enormous malice.
What is the cause, and what is the result?
I believe that predicting the future shows insight better than interpreting the past.
How far is the distance between Cho Joo-bin and us?
Does there not already exist a classification system that says:
“Certain types of people deserve what happens to them”?