- Asia
- East Asia
Kim raped or assaulted 16 victims, including 14 minors, and recorded videos of his crimes
Kim Tong-HyungMonday 24 November 2025 11:12 GMT
open image in gallerySeoul Police released a mugshot of Kim Nok-wan to Korean media (Seoul Metropolitan Police)
On The Ground newsletter: Get a weekly dispatch from our international correspondents
Get a weekly dispatch from our international correspondents
Get a weekly international news dispatch
Email*SIGN UPI would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our Privacy notice
A 33-year-old South Korean man has been handed a life sentence for orchestrating an online blackmail ring that sexually exploited and abused 261 victims, including over a dozen minors he raped or assaulted.
Kim Nok-wan was sentenced on Monday, following his January arrest after a four-year period of offending.
The Seoul Central District Court stated the severity of his crimes warranted "permanent isolation from society." Ten accomplices also received prison terms of two to four years in what authorities describe as the country’s largest cybersex crime case to date.
Starting around August 2020, Kim targeted women who posted content on social media, and men attempting to join secret chat rooms for sharing digitally-manipulated sexual images of acquaintances. He threatened to expose them and coerced them into recruiting new victims, forming a pyramid-like blackmail ring on the app that produced and shared manipulated sexual images of their targets, most of whom were minors, according to details of the crimes revealed in court.
open image in galleryA TV screen shows a file image of Kim Nok-wan, center, the leader of a Telegram- based sex crime ring, during a news program at a express bus terminal in Seoul, South Korea (Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)Kim raped or assaulted 16 victims, including 14 minors, and recorded videos of his crimes in 13 of those cases. He created roughly 1,700 sexually exploitative images or videos targeting about 70 victims, disseminating around 260 of them online to threaten those who refused to cooperate, and also attempted to blackmail some of the victims’ family members and work colleagues, the court said.
The other defendants, including five minors, knew that the victims they recruited through threats involving video and images would face the same sexual exploitation they had endured, but carried out the acts anyway to prevent their own images from being circulated, the court said.
“Most of the victims were children or adolescents, and it appears they would have suffered extreme physical and psychological pain as a result of the crimes,” the court said in a statement.
“Digital sex crimes can rapidly amplify the damages of the victims to an irreparable level in the digital space, and once sexually exploitative materials are distributed, it’s physically very difficult to completely remove them, making recovery from damage practically impossible.”
The revelation of Kim’s crimes following his January arrest triggered public shock and concern over the growing risk of sexual violence enabled by digital technologies. Monday’s ruling came almost five years after the same court issued a 40-year prison term for Cho Ju-bin on charges of blackmailing dozens of women, including minors, into filming sexually explicit videos and selling them to others.
