Everything You Need to Know About the Nth Room Case in ‘Cyber Hell’
Journalists and the police took down one of the biggest sexual exploitation rings in South Korean history.
On an ordinary Sunday morning in November 2019, journalist Kim Wan received a call from his employer, the South Korean newspaper The Hankyoreh. His boss wanted him to follow up on a tip they’d received via email about a teenage high school student who was distributing child pornography on the messaging app Telegram.
Kim wondered if it was a story worth chasing, since “the internet and child pornography had been a major issue for a long time,” he recalls in the new documentary, Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror. Nevertheless, he conducted a quick investigation based on the details provided by the informant and drafted an article that ran later that day.
“At the time, I thought that was the end of this story,” says Kim.
Or so he thought. Soon after, Kim began receiving emails notifying him that his personal information was being shared in a Telegram chat room. Upon entering the chat room, he discovered its anonymous participants had gotten hold of his personal information and were posting private pictures of him and his family. There were even disturbing messages that threatened to hunt him down.
Anxious but undeterred, Kim went on to lead The Hankyoreh’s special task force on covering what would turn out to be one of the worst cases of sexual exploitation in South Korean history: the Nth Room case.
Here’s what you need to know about Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror and the heinous sex crimes that rocked South Korea.
What is Cyber Hell about?
Cyber Hell chronicles how a group of journalists, cybercrime detectives and two college students took down one of the biggest sex abuse rings in South Korea. Between late 2018 and 2020, a network of chat rooms distributing sexually exploitative content popped up on Telegram. The doc focuses on the two most infamous of these chat rooms, the Nth Room (which refers to any one of eight different chat rooms) and the Doctor’s Room. In both rooms, young women and girls — some of them middle-school age — were deceived and then blackmailed into uploading sexually explicit photos and videos of themselves to Telegram, which were then sold and shared in chat rooms with up to tens of thousands of users. The victims were often ordered to film themselves performing lewd and degrading acts and to even engage in self-mutilation. If they didn’t comply, the chat room operators threatened to release their explicit content to their friends, families and — in the case of minors — their schools.
To protect the victims, the documentary relies heavily on reenactments, interviews, archival footage and animation to tell this shocking story.
Why is it called the Nth Room case?
Technically, the Nth Room denotes a group of eight Telegram chat rooms created by an admin with the username Godgod. The chat rooms were labeled using ordinal numbers (i.e., first, second) — hence the name Nth Room. Godgod would initially message his potential victims on Twitter and send them a link claiming that private photos of them had been leaked. Once the victim visited the link, their personal information would be collected. These Nth rooms soon led to the emergence of similar chat rooms on Telegram, the most notorious of these being the Doctor’s Room, which gained widespread attention in the Korean press due to the sheer scale and atrocity of its content.
The Doctor’s Room was run by a user named Baksa, which translates to “expert” or “a doctorate holder” in Korean. Baksa lured unwitting victims with false ads for high-paying modeling jobs. After initially asking them to send him suggestive photos, he tricked them into handing over their personal information, claiming that he needed it in order to pay them. Instead, he used that information to extort his victims, threatening to release their photos if they didn’t obey his demands for increasingly graphic content. To further scare his victims into compliance, he also posted their physical addresses in the chat room so that all its participants would know where they lived. Sexually exploitative images and videos of the victims were sold to chat room users in exchange for cryptocurrency; the Doctor’s Room even had different membership tiers based on how much users paid, with some reportedly paying up to 1.5 million won (approximately $1,200) for the most graphic content.
Who were the main perpetrators?
The Nth Room case sparked national outrage, leading to a record number of presidential-petition signatures demanding that the police disclose the identities of Baksa and all of the members in the Telegram chat rooms. In response to the overwhelming public outcry, the police revealed Baksa to be 25-year-old Cho Ju-bin, who was arrested in March 2020 and ultimately sentenced to 42 years in prison for filming and distributing sexually exploitative materials of dozens of victims, 16 of whom were reportedly underage.
Godgod, the creator of the original Nth rooms, was revealed to be a 24-year-old college student named Moon Hyung-wook. Moon was apprehended a couple of months after Cho, in May 2020, and later sentenced to 34 years in prison for coercing 20 women and girls into sharing 3,800 sexually explicit videos of themselves.
Although the exact number of participants in the Telegram chat rooms is unknown due to the existence of duplicate accounts, it’s estimated that pornographic content of these victims was shared with anywhere between 60,000 and over 100,000 users.
Who is in Cyber Hell?
The documentary includes interviews with Kim Wan and his colleague Oh Yeon-seo, the two journalists from The Hankyoreh who were the first to do in-depth reporting on Baksa and the Doctor’s Room. Also featured are Team Flame, the code name for a duo of student journalists who first wrote about Godgod and the Nth Rooms; a whistleblower nicknamed Joker, who shared crucial details about Baksa with Kim and Oh; and Chang Eun-jo and Choi Kwang-il of JTBC’s Spotlight and Jeong Jae-won of SBS’s Y-Story (both Spotlight and Y-Story are popular investigative journalism programs aired on Korean TV). In addition, cybercrime detectives across multiple police agencies are also featured, describing how they investigated and ultimately captured Moon and Cho.
What was the aftermath?
By the end of 2020, 3,757 people were arrested and 245 were imprisoned in direct connection to the Nth Room case, with the average age of suspects being only 21. The Hankyoreh also set up an archive of digital sex crimes, including an org chart of primary suspects linked to the case.
In response to the Nth Room case, the Committee Against Telegram Sexual Exploitation was established in South Korea to help investigate and respond to various issues related to sexual exploitation on Telegram. Additionally, the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office has offered the Nth Room victims legal assistance with name changes. Also, according to Korean law, crime victims in general are entitled to receive some financial, psychological and legal support from the government to recover and readjust to their daily lives.
Beginning in 2020, the South Korean National Assembly passed a series of laws to help prevent sexual exploitation crimes like the Nth Room case from happening again. Some of these include increased prison sentences and fines for various types of sex crimes and amendments that punish those who possess, buy, store or watch illegally filmed sexual content with a maximum sentence of three years in prison or a fine of up to 30 million won (roughly $24,000). Previously, only those who sold, leased or distributed such content were subject to punishment.
While these measures should’ve been a cause for celebration for the victims of the Nth Room case, The Hankyoreh journalist Oh Yeon-seo wrote at the time, “[The victims] were still busy trying to individually delete sexually exploited materials that had resurfaced on social media. Their efforts to have them removed could not keep up with the rate at which they were circulating.” Though Moon, Cho and many of the other perpetrators linked to the Nth Room case have been arrested, as the documentary notes at the end, the sexually explicit videos they obtained from their victims are still being sold worldwide on instant messaging platforms and the dark web to this day.
Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror is now streaming on Netflix.
This article originally appeared on Netflix Tudum.