Prosecutors said 38 people were involved in total in what they called virtual enslavement off women and teenagers online, he called himself the doctor thes days.

All of South Korea knows his real name.

Chou Dubin was arrested in March for running a notorious sex abuse chat room online.

Today, the court and Soul decided he'll spend the next four decades in prison for it.

Outside the court, female activists read out statements from some of Cho's victims in order for everyone to live in a safe society in the future, the court should also impose severe punishment on accomplices and set an example to prevent such evil from happening again.

In total, there was 74 victims, including 16 underage girls.

Prosecutors said the women were blackmailed into filming degrading and sometimes violent sexual imagery off themselves.

That imagery was then distributed to paying customers via the messaging app telegram Attn.

Least 10,000 people used chose chatroom, some paying up to €1000 for access way live in a digital society that's evolving every day.

Those who committed these terrible crimes are not human beings.

The South Korean justice system has long been accused of failing the victims of sexual violence.

It was one of the issues targeted in me to protests in 2018.

Activists have welcomed show sentence as a step in the right direction, but there's still a long way to go.

After his arrest, South Korean police identified dozens of similar chat rooms and said, They're being used by tens of thousands of people, and journalist Frank Smith joins me now form or on this from Seoul.

Frank, Do we know how this ring off sexual blackmail worked?

Well, what the managers of this site would do is they would recruit young teens.

Female teens generally at risk teens with the promise of securing them, work as models and they'd have them upload their photographs and then slowly get more information from them, their names and their address.

And then they'd ask them to upload MAWR explicit material and then use that content to blackmail them into providing MAWR explicit material and videos.

And then they would post those videos to, uh, sharing website that required secure passwords.

And then they would ask, you know, users potential users of that website to pay them upwards of 1200 U.

S.

Dollars and those people, those users would then have to prove themselves by uploading their own explicit material.

There was something like 50 of these chat rooms involved and something like 250,000 people accessing these explicit chat rooms.

It's pretty sorted.

Uh, it's not the first instance, though, off digital sex crimes against women in South Korea.

Frank.

Why does this keep happening?

Well, that's a good question.

We you know, we don't need to go far back toe Look at some other scandals that have happened here recently.

The Burning Sun scandal, which, you know, caught some some K pop idol stars.

Some entertain entertainers involved in drugging women at a nightclub called the Burning Sun and then, um, sexually assaulting them, videoing that sexual assault and then uploading it and sharing it on message sharing.

APS, um, it has to do perhaps with a culture here If we look at the night club culture, there's a thing called booking, where men typically occupy rooms within a nightclub and women in other rooms and then staff are suggested to go into the rooms with the women and bring women into the rooms with the men.

Kind of deliver them.

And it, in a way commodified eyes women here.

We've had other scandals as well.

The whole, um, spying scandal Spy cam scandal where cameras were put in washrooms, various public washrooms to spy on women's and then upload videos of those, um, cameras.

And other similar to this telegram sex scandal.

Similar scandals where videos have been taken without women's consent of a sexual nature and uploaded on toe websites that share those videos more widely.

We'll leave it there for the time being.

But thank you so much for joining us.