South Korea faces digital sex crime epidemic with deepfake nude images of underage girls circulating online. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol urged authorities to take drastic measures to “eliminate” the phenomenon.

In particular, authorities, journalists and social media users recently identified a large number of online chat groups where members were creating and sharing sexual “deepfake” images of some underage girls.

What are deepfake sex images?

Deepfake images are created using artificial intelligence and often combine the face of a real person with a fake body. Deepfake enables someone to falsify a video by putting one person’s face on another’s body (or vice versa) and adjusting voice, expressions and movement. In this way, it creates a false imaged face, which, however, looks like a real one.

South Korea’s media regulator is holding an emergency meeting following the discoveries.

Victims are minors and perpetrators are teenagers

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol instructed authorities to “thoroughly investigate and deal with these digital sex crimes to eradicate them.”

“Recently, deepfake videos targeting an unspecified number of people have been circulating rapidly on social media,” President Yoon said at a cabinet meeting.

“The victims are often minors and the perpetrators are mostly teenagers.”

The multitude of chat groups, linked to schools and universities across the country, were discovered on social media app Telegram last week.

Users, mostly teenage students, uploaded photos of people they knew, both classmates and teachers, and other users turned them into sexual deepfake images.

The discoveries followed the arrest of Russian-born Telegram founder Pavel Durov on Saturday after child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud were suspected to be taking place on the encrypted messaging app.

“National Emergency”

South Korea has a dark history of digital sex crimes.

In 2019, it emerged that men were using Telegram chatrooms to blackmail dozens of young women into sexual acts, in a scandal known as the nth-room. The group’s leader, Cho Ju-bin, was sentenced to 42 years in prison.

Online deepfake sex crimes have increased, according to South Korean police. A total of 297 cases were reported in the first seven months of this year, up from 180 last year and 160 in 2021.

Teenagers were responsible for more than two-thirds of offenses in the past three years.

The Korea Teachers’ Union, meanwhile, believes more than 200 schools have been affected. The number of deepfakes videos targeting teachers has increased over the past two years, according to the Ministry of Education.

Park Ji-hyun, a women’s rights activist and former leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, said the government should declare a state of “national emergency” in response to South Korea’s deepfake porn problem.

“Deepfake sexual abuse material can be created in just one minute, and anyone can enter the chatroom without any verification process,” Ms. Park wrote on X.

“Incidents like this are happening in middle schools, high schools and universities across the country.”