Posting nude photos of your wife or girlfriend on the Internet is apparently not on. Not in Korea, anyway.
Yonhap reports that the National Police Agency’s cybercrimes division has arrested two website administrators and charged (without detention) 41 website members and a would-be hacker in relation to a porn site that was posting nude photographs of spouses and girlfriends/boyfriends.
According to police, the site had managed to get some 300,000 members since it opened in 2001. It had a special section for spouse/lover photos, and had made some 620 million won in in ill-begotten gains.
Some 8,000 photos of spouses and girlfriends/boyfriends were posted. The 41 members who were busted made 50-150 won each time these photos were shared, earning about 60 million won in total.
Among those 41 were a university professor, the president of a trading company, an executive for a brokerage company, a film scenario writer, the son of a county head, an auditor with some American association and a Chinese businessman. Three women were also included.
The women in the photos included university students, housewives, teachers, nurses, civil servant, prostitutes, and even the head of an art hagwon.
One photo apparently included the entire family, kids and all, while others depicted wife swapping and men having sex with several women.
Police said some of the couple posed for the camera to make ends meet, but it seems most of the offenders did so because of their “abnormal sexual tastes” or to show of the beauty of their significant others.
Oh, as for that hacker, he apparently created a program that allowed 30 site members to download stuff for free. Naughty boy.
Police have asked Korea’s cyber ethics nannies to shut the site down. They also believe there to be similar sites, so they’re expanding their investigation.
A police official said that members first posted such photos for fun, but as comments mounted, they began to compete, and that some seemed hooked as they sought better ways to get their rocks off. He also said, and I quote, “That ordinary people would unreservedly distribute openly obscene photos of their spouses frankly shows how sexual morals are collapsing.”
16 Comments
Robert, what, no links to the offending website?
Hey, if I had it, it’d link it. Unfortunately, Korea’s offical news agency isn’t in the business of promoting porn sites.
Robert, what, no links to the offending website? This is important info (as with your booby posts) that must be researched so that one can get a true ‘picture’ of Korean society.
In other words, despite the complaints of others, some of us despicable expats like the articles on ‘less than stiff upper lip subjects’.
Of course, even if you had the link, you’d probably need to enter your national ID # for ‘age verification purposes’. Wow…. 8000 photos. I wonder how many ‘members’ this represents.
Land of the Morning Come.
Am I missing something here? Are there no Korean-based porn sites? There are no porn sites for paying customers? If there are, what laws are these people breaking? It becomes illegal only if the people putting up the images are not Korean gangsters who have paid off the police, or what?
And an even bigger conundrum: has there been a real crackdown on the sex industry in Korea I haven’t heard about? I haven’t been in country since 2002. When I left, the entertainment areas, room salons, love hotels, red light areas near train stations, the works were still readily identifiable and everywhere. Walking to get a taxi each morning, I could also find strown all over the ground flyers with pay numbers or ads for clubs with barely clothed women on them and see trucks with special ad boards with the same women on them cruising at night.
Has all that disappeared? Or is busting these people just a very selective event? I honestly, really don’t get it. How can all these other things I’ve seen in public not bring the police if this photo sharing site does? And again, as for the Korean-based porno sites, I have no clue, I’ve never surfed for any, but I think I will now just to see if I am missing the bigger picture….
But first, as for the ones who shared nude photos of their whole family - including kids, the parents should be taken stripped out in the public square and sodomized by men who have been kept in total isolation in either Korea’s worst prisons or insane asylums.
As far as I know, there are no Korea-based porn sites (i.e., ones that show muff). Korean porn sites, yes, and I could rattle off a couple of them if you need visual evidence. But I believe the servers are all based overseas, and in the United States in particular. I’m not sure what the deal is with the site mentioned in the Yonhap piece. Perhaps the server was in the States but the administrators here, or perhaps the server was here. I really can’t say.
The short answer is no. The red-light districts have taken a beating, but other places of prostitution are still doing a brisk trade.
Well, with things like this, police tend to be very selective. For the most part, police see prostitution and porn as victimless crimes, so even though the current administration see things differently and occassionally makes the police launch crackdowns, the cops are willing to turn a blind eye as long as certain lines aren’t crossed. Spouse photos and wife swapping are apparently two of those lines.
This proves that the majority of closet pervs tend to come from the elites of Korean society. Sicko bastards.
…and of course, this is really all the motivation you need — bust 41 people (out of 300,000) in order to reinforce the idea that there’s something ‘abnormal’ about posting or looking at nude photos. Just like any of the other “crackdowns” that have been announced, it really seems to be more about image than substance — a chance for the government to grab a couple headlines away from the newest scandal and make it look like they’re actually doing something useful — protecting society from the types of ‘perverts’ who get their kicks by looking at nude pictures rather than, say, getting some trim off a prostitute.
“who get their kicks by looking at nude pictures rather than, say, getting some trim off a prostitute.”
That’s the part I find bizarre: that in the land of 10,000 ways to get a prostitute, sharing nude pictures is illegal…
Wait……I remember a story from a couple of years back about a Korean website that had live sex via the internet. Was that based outside of Korea? I thought the studio and sex were done inside Korea….???….
Ajumma’s nude except for her sun visor….
–shudder–
They wouldn’t have gotten into trouble if they were discrete or flocking near a beach getting fresh air.
This remains so weird. When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea (30 years ago) I noted that it cost more to buy a black market used playboy than actually do the deed with a live woman (don’t know about dead ones?) Korean attitudes toward sex remain contradictory to say the least.
This news has completely changed my views on the Chris Charles saga. I now firmly believe that he was seduced into it one of his adult students who also happened to be one of the depraved ajummas from the website detailed above. It is clear to me that she was getting photos put up on an American blogsite as the next proponent of Hallyu……
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[...] sites, despite all the participants presumably not minding about their cheating on them; an obscene photo-sharing site, where the legal rationale was a tad desperate; and finally, want to close down my favorite [...]