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cover of episode #342: Korean College Student Forces 100 Girls To Mutilate Themselves On Camera LIVE For His Chatrooms

#342: Korean College Student Forces 100 Girls To Mutilate Themselves On Camera LIVE For His Chatrooms

2024/3/7
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Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. There was no point in any of the officers to even go home and sleep. Their desks are littered with empty coffee cups, cup ramen, and energy drinks.

I mean, they're running out of time. So with every case, they inevitably feel a sense of urgency. We got to catch the robber. We got to hunt down the killer. But this is a different kind of urgency that they're feeling. This feels like straight up torture. Every few seconds, their phone would light up with another alert. Another video is being uploaded to the Telegram chat room. They would pick up their phones. It's another one. What is it this time? Another girl being forced to commit sexual acts with her little brother.

Their phones would drop to their desk and it's such a defeating feeling. They feel like they're being taunted. So with every photo or video, and there's a lot of them, they're coming up every few seconds, every few minutes at the latest, they're being uploaded into these illegal telegram chat rooms. And the police felt like they would be time traveling, just teleported to the scene of a crime. They'd be outside of a house staring through the window and watching people produce CP, torture videos, abuse, humiliation, violence.

And then once the video is over, they're transported back to the police station. They have no clue who these girls are, where they are, how to catch them, who's doing this to them. They don't know anything. The police had just discovered a few months ago that there was dark web-level activity on the surface web on an app called Telegram. There were organized crime rings all there to distribute real CP and torture videos.

They first stumbled upon Gotham Room, which is a marketplace for chatroom creators on Telegram to market their businesses. I mean, they had all sorts of rooms. So if you went to Gotham Room thinking, maybe I have a niche interest, you do not. They have something for everybody disgusting. Female nurse rooms, female military rooms, middle school girl live stream rooms. They have the Lolly Room, which stands for Lolita Room. And those are just rooms that depict individuals.

infants, small, tiny infants being filmed explicitly to be shared with depraved watchers. Once you find the quote room of your liking, the watchers, the buyers, they'll have to be vetted before being allowed into the Telegram chat room of their choosing. They were saying that they need proof that you're a man.

I mean, we're not going to unpack that, but they think that in order to be a man, you need to have a very specific body part. And they want to see a photo of your body part next to your username. Then after providing proof of package, a government issued ID needs to be sent to the moderators. Then your own explicit video depicting your own wife, sister, daughter, niece, cousin, doesn't matter. That needs to be posted. And lastly, all that would be required is a crypto payment. Then you get sent a link.

That link is your access point to that chat room. Once you have that link, you have the power. You can anonymously torture who they call the slaves. The girls that are being blackmailed, threatened, and forced into producing these CP torture videos, you can taunt them. You can threaten them. And for an extra fee, you can get their home address and physically go R-word them.

And that's just one chat room. There are hundreds upon hundreds, if not thousands of Telegram chat rooms providing these videos. And just like any other industry. So there's buyers, there's sellers, and then there's monopolies. The brand names of the industry, the most sought after chat rooms. They belong to two anonymous creators, The Doctor and GodGod.

The Doctor runs the Doctor's Rooms, an expansive network of chat rooms that amass likely over a hundred victims. God God runs the Nth Rooms, the original torture chambers of the Telegram chat rooms. Now, even though The Doctor has the more profitable business with a wider reach, God God has the reputation. Everybody wanted to be in the Nth Rooms. They were more exclusive, more personal.

The doctor was all about money. You would have to pay, what, $1,200 to join a VIP room? And then once you join, if you want the address to a victim's house, if you want to, like, request a specific type of torture, you'd have to pay another fee for that. But God God, he's not in it for the money. He would take your request only if he thought it was sick enough. And he just was known to have a tighter grip on his, quote, slaves. He would actually dox every single one of them in the chat rooms.

all the victims you're talking about all the victims they called them slaves yeah the police had been chasing the doctor and god god for months but both of them are kind of like water so every time they got close to finding them they would scoop the water and they would just slip through their finger cracks

And it's not like they can just ask the chat rooms who they are. Why are you guys doing this? The police were able to get a link into some of these chat rooms, but they were undercover. If they start asking around for people's names, addresses, victim information, clues on who the doctor or God God is, they're going to be outed as cops. The chat room would then self-destruct. It would get bombed, aka they would just delete the chat room and all of its evidence and start a new one without the undercover police. So all they can do really is just sit there and watch.

After a new video was sent, the chat room would have non-stop activity of people commenting things like, "It looks delicious. Her face isn't my type though. I want to see her lick the toilet. Make her get down on her knees and cry." They would beg the creator of the chat room, "The doctor, please just send her address. We just want to know where she is because what's the fun if we can't go r-word her? We promise we'll film it."

The police would have no way of finding out who these people were, the creators or the watchers. They're actively planning a crime and the police could do nothing but just watch.

One video uploaded into the chat depicted a woman being dragged into a motel room and that address to that motel room was leaked in a separate VIP chat room that the police were not privy to so they couldn't get the address. And one by one, this is being live streamed, they saw strangers, men from the chat rooms coming into the motel room and essaying her together. We don't know the exact number of people but it was a lot.

All of it was live streamed and uploaded into the rooms. The police knew that the victim from the motel room died soon after. She had been pushed to a very scary place mentally. The news of her death started spreading on the chat rooms and the watchers were responding, Wait, the motel girl really died? That's so sad. Why don't we go to her funeral and relieve ourselves on her picture one last time? It'll be like our last gift to her.

Damn it, if she knew that she was going to go out, she should have at least put on one big last show for us. She should have given us her body before she died, frowny face.

The officers slam their phones down on the table because they can't keep reading stuff like this. They got to do something about it. They have to find the victims. They have to find the others before they die. There's at least five victims in each chat room. And if the police were correct about their suspicions, the doctor, the creator of this chat room, had at least 70 to 80 chat rooms. Hundreds of victims that they need to hunt down to protect.

Go through all the videos and see if we can find anything. We need all the clues that we can get. The videos are all we have. They're looking for any identifying features, freckles, moles, school uniforms, photos in the background, writing somewhere, a name, anything. They need to get to the victims before the doctor does.

They could not sit there and watch another video of a new victim being forced to carve the word "slave" into her body, or girls being forced to film themselves defecating in a toilet and then eating out of the toilet bowl like a dog, or victims being forced to sneak into men's public restrooms and film themselves licking the urinal, or even victims who were forced to purchase live caterpillars from the store and film themselves placing them inside while they're still alive. So far, the youngest victim that they found was 12.

12 years old. But there were reports that they could be even younger, much younger. The police were able to track down the next person that they wanted to talk to, someone that could provide even deeper insight into the inner workings of the rooms. So about a dozen officers, they show up to speak with that person, but they need to handle this as sensitively as possible. I mean, they don't want to scare them. So they wait and they wait until the perfect moment to approach

arises and for a while they're just watching, they're just surveilling and it's such an oddly innocent sight in comparison to all the videos that they've been analyzing the past few months. It feels almost peaceful, serene in a way. The father smiling at his son, "See you're getting it!" And the son is nervously shouting at his dad like, "Wait don't let go!" It's the picture of familial bliss, father and son.

But they were watching the creator of the doctor's rooms. They were watching the doctor. He was right there in front of them learning how to ride a bike. And he was much younger than they thought.

We would like to thank today's sponsors who have made it possible for Rotten Mango to support NAMI Network, whose mission is to combat human trafficking. NAMI has an impressive international reach with a heavy presence in Asia. They help provide life-changing opportunities for survivors of trafficking by providing workforce and life skills for the women that they serve. This episode's partnerships have also made it possible to support Rotten Mango's growing team of dedicated researchers and translators.

We would also like to thank our listeners for your continued support as we work on our mission to be worthy advocates of these causes. Now, as always, full show notes are available at RottenMangoPodcast.com. This is part two of our previous episode, which will be linked below. In the first part, we focus mainly on the discovery of the doctor's rooms on Telegram and the doctor and the cat and mouse games between the doctor and the producers of major news networks in South Korea.

We also went over the doctor's signatures. So that's what he did to his victims, his methods of torture and how he just kept them physically and psychologically imprisoned. I mean, there is a heavy, heavy content warning for part one and part two. Part two also involves the topic of trafficking, essay and torture of our most vulnerable population. The crimes are incredibly graphic. So if you feel like this case is going to be a bit too much, go take care of yourself. We will see you in the next one.

Victims' names have been altered to protect their anonymity and some testimonies have been condensed or combined for clarity. And one additional note, we will be using the word "slave" frequently in this episode. It's not that I think that they are being portrayed as slaves, that's what they were called in the chat rooms, that's what they were forced to call themselves during their torture videos. I was trying to think of ways to soften the word because I know it's, especially in the US, it's such a strong word with heavy connotations.

But it felt wrong to soften a word that is such a big part of this case.

Victims were forced to write and then later carve that word into their bodies with a knife and to use any other word than that for the sole purpose of making it easier for us to sleep at night, it feels like we're downplaying the extent of evil in this case. So to clarify, this is not a personal term that I've coined to describe the victims in this situation. It is what they were called in the chat rooms by the perpetrators, by the watchers, and it is the word that they were forced to call themselves.

So with that being said, let's get into it.

The average pen is six inches long. And there's one sitting right in front of 24-year-old Cho Ju-bin in the interrogation room. We're just going to call him Cho. He had been arrested while he's learning how to ride a bike from his dad. And the police are now accusing him of being the doctor. The doctor of the Telegram chat rooms. He's like, I'm not the doctor. It's not me. I mean, this is just so unjust. I was just a member of the doctor's rooms. I didn't even know that it was like torture. I thought the girls were into it. I'm not the doctor. I'm not the doctor.

then why do you have a hundred thousand dollars of cash in your room with any of this please i'm not the doctor they were not listening to him the police weren't even entertaining the idea that they might have the wrong guy he keeps pleading i mean this is ridiculous can i at least use the restroom so as cho gets up in one swift motion he pockets the pen on the table and gets escorted to the police restroom the average pen is six inches long the average throat is only five inches

He walks into the empty police restroom and he turns on the water faucet. He's gripping the sides of the sink and he's staring into the mirror. If they're not gonna believe him, he's gotta do something drastic to get them to see the truth.

And bam, he slams his head on the edge of the bathroom sink. Then he pulls back again. His head is throbbing, but he goes again. And bam, he slams his head on the sink. He can hear the officers running towards the restroom. So he takes one last breath, grabs the pen from his pocket and shoves it into his throat. He was going to die by swallowing this pen because even he knew prison is no place for doctors.

There's an insult in South Korea called 일배충. Well, I guess the translation would be kind of like 일배 bug. 일배 is used to describe someone who has no future and is just a pest to society. But the word originates from people who use the website 일배스토어하우스. It's essentially like 4chan, where there are different categories for a person to post in. But it's 일배 is specifically dominated by incels.

It's considered the 55th most visited website in South Korea with 17 million visits a month. You say 55th? Yeah.

Oh, 17 million visits a month. Now, it's not hard to visit. It's just on the Internet. It's not on the dark web. You don't need a password to get in. But once you're in, you feel like the FBI is watching you. So all of the ads on the website, very aggressive cartoon style, explicit materials. And even just the post on there. I feel like I'm on a watch list just by spending a full day on there. I mean, I think the best way to throw you into the eBay world is just to break down some of the theories and terms that they use.

One of the biggest ideas on Yilbet's storehouse is the dishwasher theory. The dishwashing theory was literally made by Yilbet Bugs to describe the idea of marrying sluts. They think that women who have had more than, I don't know, two partners before getting married are considered dirty dishes. And the men who eventually marry them are dishwashers.

That's their job. So these men are beta males. I mean, you don't even get to eat the meal, they say. So on this dish, there used to be a five-star filet mignon steak. Another man ate it and then left half of it. Then another man came by, ate the rest of it, and now you're just stuck with filet mignon juices on a dirty dish, and that's who you've married, and all day you're going to spend cleaning up that dirty dish. You're going to be left supporting the wife who doesn't even have anything to offer other than her dirty bowl.

People on the forum will just comment, dishwashing in threads when they think that there is a man that's marrying a dirty dish. Yeah. And they start making fun of the both of them because the woman is a manipulative parasite that has had her fun and now wants to settle down. And the man is an idiot who got the short end of the stick.

Is it like very similar to American incels? Yeah. Platform, same kind of topic and conversation. Yeah. I mean, okay, you tell me. I don't know if it's worse or less extreme, but one post on the website is titled, currently Korean women are in a state of mental breakdowns.

The post shows a chart where single Korean women are much more likely to have mental disorders compared to married men, married women, and even single men. We don't know if this graph is even accurate, okay? It's just like you could make it in Excel. The post reads, due to the dating and marriage rate, Korean men have abandoned Korean women. Statistically, I don't think that's true. If women don't get love and attention from a man, they become mentally ill. This is an article? Yeah, this is like a post that they wrote. Oh.

Onto the forum. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot, but the comments under this thread get even crazier. It's a lot to unpack. They read, if you're over 30 and you're a female, you're basically a manufacturing factory that produces deformed babies. If you still have maybe good face, body, long hair, and a big P-U-S-S-Y, a few men will still kind of line up, I think, for a 30-year-old woman. Another post is just titled, why you shouldn't marry a used P-U-S-S-Y.

Yeah, it reads, the average age of marriage for a woman in Korea is 30. And that means they typically have seven relationships before they get married. If we estimate that she has intimate relations with each of those seven men 100 times, that means she's likely had intimate relations 700 times before meeting you. Now, if we count the number of pumps, her private area, singular pumps, right?

Her private area will take over the course of her relationship. We can say it's 500 thrust in each act. It'll total up to 350,000 times that she's had insertion. Why are they doing that? Because of that...

I think that we can no longer consider this a female private part, but basically a black hole that just sucks everything in. That's what they're saying. Like they're trying to bring up like a big, big number. Yeah, they're doing... Oh my God, look at this number, guys. I don't know what kind of math they're doing. They're doing math, right? Yeah, exactly. If you think about it, tens of thousands of little male fluids are already sitting in your bride's private and it's pretty much a dried up water reservoir. I mean, imagine your baby coming out of that.

Do you feel like your life is going to even improve by seeing used privates like that? One person just commented a gif of an adult entertainer's face while she's in the middle of her performance. And in response to that, someone comments, I hate big pie pepperoni chest so much. They're talking about the part of the chest. Another reads, I'm starting to believe the only hope for men is to declare civil war against women and turn them all into war brides.

Another comment says, you know, I think the idea that women can only date one man for the rest of their life is kind of ridiculous and unreasonable. Like the concept doesn't make sense. I say we all just see women's bodies and P-U-S-S-Y's as public property and we can all use them together and we can all make sure that we keep them clean.

They even have like their own dictionary. There's something called kimchi girl, and it means a bitch who's always angry and serious. And then on the other end of that spectrum, they have the amulang girl. And amulang, which is basically a very dumb way of saying, I don't know. And it's a dumb girl who does nothing but always cries to get out of problems and situations and leave messes for everybody else.

Yeah, many of these terms and comments would make their way over to the Telegram chat rooms. Ylbe's storehouse was like a gateway drug to the nth rooms and the doctor's rooms. A few clicks after finding the right people on Ylbe and you're let in on the internet's biggest secret, hiding in plain sight. Easy access, CP, and torture all on the publicly available Telegram, not even the dark web. A few easy clicks and you'll be at the center of the doctor's room.

At 3 a.m. in Seoul, there is a large splash near the Yongdong Bridge. An office worker in his 40s was found dead floating in the Han River. This would be the sixth person in the past few days to be found dead in Seoul. All self-exits and all six of them are connected to one another. So when the news breaks out that another body is found, netizens start reacting and they're writing online. Probably the best thing he's ever done in his life. One down, 250,000 more to go.

Why do something so embarrassing and make your own death something to be laughed at? This is not the normal reaction netizens have to someone jumping into the Han River in the middle of the night. But netizens do not feel an ounce of sadness for this man because he had left behind a note that read, I deposited money into the doctor's rooms. I didn't know it was going to become so big.

He had been a purchaser and watcher of CP, and all six of them that had recently died were connected because all six of them were being investigated for being buyers. But I thought the whole thing was anonymous, right? And that's why the police can't catch anyone. The creator, the watcher, the purchaser. I mean, they're all shielded by a veil of anonymity. No, no.

After news broke of the existence of these chat rooms, vigilante justices decided to take it upon themselves to infiltrate these chat rooms. They would gather as many usernames as possible. They would track them down one by one. They would use any clues from any messages that they wrote, their profile picture, any information on their pages. You'd be surprised at how people were tracked down just in terms of identity searching. One chat room member briefly mentioned what they ate for lunch.

And in a message long, long, long, long time ago, and there's like hundreds of people in this chat room, right? To just log down what everybody's saying is crazy. So in a message long time ago, that same username mentioned being in school still. Someone went and searched all the school menus in the city and started cross-referencing with what they ate for lunch with the school menus in the city. They were able to find out which school they went to. And from there, they narrowed it down to who they thought that person was.

So obviously, catching God, God and the doctor are different stories. But through these types of methods, vigilante justices were trying to track down the viewers of the videos. There was a website that started trending in South Korea called Digital Prison. It was leaking usernames, full government names of watchers that were on the doctor's rooms on Telegram and the anthrooms. People were cross-referencing the massive list of names with people in their personal lives. Wives were discovering their husbands were on there. Kids are finding out that their dads are on there. Even

eight teachers were exposed to be buyers of cp so some hackers yeah they're not even hackers oh they're like you and me we just get a link into one of the rooms and we start making an excel spreadsheet of every username and all the clues that we can gather they're not hacking anything okay

In response to the website Digital Prison, people were jumping into the Han River. They were fleeing the country and Naver, the Google of Korea, had new trending searches. How to delete telegram. Telegram, nthroom case, human feces, nthroom, telegram, nthroom, delete. Digital analysts didn't even have a second after all of this that their phone lines were not going off. Hello, this is Sam of IT. I will die if this gets exposed.

You need to help me delete all this stuff on my devices. He was talking about the videos from Telegram. He had downloaded torture CP videos and he didn't want any of that to be showing. And he said he needed the analyst to wipe everything and he ranted to them. I mean, I'm just wondering, is going on Anthro such a heinous crime that I should be shunned from society? I just did it out of curiosity with my friends and all I did really was just like watch one video, one video.

The digital analyst would later say, "I didn't really know what to do. I usually help victims wipe their information and details off the internet. I've never had so many perpetrators reaching out to me, asking me for help." Is he not supposed to report these people? I think he was.

Now, a lot of digital analysts in the city were overwhelmed with requests for services because there were an estimated 260,000 buyers of the Nth Room and Doctors Rooms. The public wanted all 260,000 names released.

In part one, we went over the creation of the doctor's room on Telegram and all of the other smaller chat rooms, the marketplaces for people to join on Telegram where they can choose between categories of torture and CP that they want to see, even choose the age groups of CP that they'd like. Then they're guided into the appropriate Telegram rooms that have those things. I mean, we went over that. But I think a huge part of this case is how the hell is this on Telegram?

Telegram is the sixth most downloaded app in the world and all of the stuff in the nth rooms and the doctor's rooms. I mean, it feels like it belongs on the dark web, but no, it's just like six, seven clicks away from Google to get there.

And I just want to set a quick disclaimer real quick. Telegram is not inherently a bad app. And the majority of people using Telegram are not trying to use it for nefarious activities. So, for example, Ukrainians are said to increasingly rely on Telegram for accurate news and information from on-the-ground journalists who provide real-time updates, but also warnings for people to flee to safety

So I don't want to make it appear as if I'm like demonizing Telegram or saying Telegram shouldn't exist. I think Telegram is one of those tricky applications because when it's used for good, it's used for a lot of good. It provides secure channels of conversation that can be life-changing or even life-saving in times of war. But because of the private and somewhat anonymous features Telegram utilizes, it creates this almost unintentional breeding ground for criminal activity.

There are four features that make Telegram a solid choice for people who don't want to be tracked, listened to, or watched. First, Telegram lets you create an account rather easily. You do need a phone number to sign up, but once you create your account, you can unlink your phone number. But if you really don't want to be traced, there are a lot of services that will sell you a phone number that's not linked to you for the sole purpose of creating a Telegram account anonymously.

Telegram does not require an email or a verification email. It's very simple to set up. And they have a feature called secret chats. It makes it so that Telegram does not save any chat history. If you message someone and you delete that message off your Telegram and the receiver of that message that you're talking to deletes that message off of their Telegram, it's gone for good. It's not stored or backed up on any of the Telegram servers. It's like that conversation never happened.

But even if you haven't deleted the chat from your phone because it's not stored on Telegram servers, even if the FBI, for example, requested Telegram to release those messages, they don't have them to begin with.

They don't have anything to give. Not that they would even cooperate. Telegram like never cooperates with the FBI. Telegram is basically unmoderated on a central level as well. So on YouTube, obviously there's moderation in the fact that we can't upload certain things. Same with Instagram, TikTok, all those platforms. Telegram, there's no central moderation. Really? So you can post whatever the hell you want. Yeah. I mean, you could get arrested for it in other ways, but Telegram is not going to take it down.

They're not going to censor you. They're not going to say, oh, this is too much for our platform. Interesting. Yeah. And regardless of that, Telegram hardly ever works with government agencies to hand over information on users. They've got a crazy strong privacy policy. So, for example, the FBI can subpoena Apple to hand over some message content from iMessages.

So if they have a target, they could possibly render 25 days of iMessage lookups from the target number. They could render backups of a target device. If the target device uses iCloud backup, they could acquire all the content from the iCloud backup as well as iMessage backups. Basically, a lot of messages can be seen. You should function at any given moment using iMessage that the FBI could very likely see your text messages.

But with Telegram, they do not release any message content. They provide no contact information, even in active criminal investigations. They will only provide an IP address and a phone number in confirmed terrorist investigations. That's it. The founder stated, Telegram will stand for freedom and privacy. Privacy is not for sale and human rights should not be compromised.

There is also a self-destruct feature. You know how in Snapchat, when someone sees something, it disappears? You could do that on Telegram, but you can do it on a large scale. And another thing with Telegram is you can host massive chat rooms, chat rooms with over 200,000 people, and they let you share very large files. You could upload videos onto these chat rooms.

Telegram, if used for the wrong purposes, can turn into Gotham. It can turn into a digital lawless land where you can distribute criminal material at a large scale very quickly. And before the doctor's rooms, there was God God and the nth rooms on Telegram.

The nth rooms were the original torture CP slavery forums that would go on to inspire the rooms like the doctor's rooms to be made. But just like the doctor, nth room did not just consist of one telegram chat room. The name nth rooms is used to describe a collection of rooms created by God God. And in the beginning, there were only eight rooms. But with more demand, with more supply, with new victims, more chat rooms would pop up. Another nth room, then two, then four, then 16. The nth rooms were

We're like opening a door into this long spiral staircase into the depths of hell. And you start walking down the staircase, just spiraling into the void. And you start opening these doors. And every door that you open, there's new people, new girls, new victims that are forced to perform for a camera. And then when you think that you've gotten to the bottom, that it cannot possibly get darker, that there's not another level, the spiral staircase winds even more. And a new door appears. And then another. And then another.

In math, the letter N can represent a sequence of numbers that continues into infinity. So eventually the term nth room becomes an umbrella term for any online chat room with explicit torture content. It almost becomes like the Kleenex effect. You know, it's like, can you pass me the Kleenex? Even if you don't have the brand Kleenex next to you, you would pass me a tissue. So the nth rooms, they became synonymous with CP.

Can you give me a link to the nth rooms? It's basically, can you give me a link to an illegal Telegram chat room? And because it's the nth rooms, you never knew when a new one was going to pop up. It was late into the evening when Yuna gets a notification on her phone. She has been invited to a chat room on Telegram and she thought it was kind of odd, but she clicked the link and a video starts instantly playing. And all these messages start coming in. Ding!

The messages are flooding the chat. She's being spammed with screenshots from the video, comments, even gifs that are playing on a loop. Yuna quickly mutes her phone in case her family can hear from the living room, but the screen keeps lighting up with more notifications. She's staring at the phone, and it's a video of herself. And all she can hear very lightly in the background are her own screams. She's staring at a video from one of the worst nights of her life.

A few weeks ago, she had been attacked in a grocery store parking lot. A man had dragged her to a dark corner where nobody could see or hear her and essayed her while he filmed the whole thing. That video was somehow now in a chat room on Telegram filled with hundreds of people reacting and responding to it. Her heart starts racing. Her stomach is dropping. Like, who are these people? How did they even get this video?

Two new messages are sent into the chat rooms. The first is a picture of her front door. The second, her full home address. And then a third message appears. Yuna, right? Go to the black van in the alleyway outside your house or we release this video to the public. Yuna went because...

Her body went into autopilot mode, I mean, to protect her from what's about to happen. She snuck out because I think a lot of social context is needed. I think even in the U.S., when revenge explicit videos are posted, it ruins your life. It ruins everything. But in Korea, it's a little bit worse. It's a little bit more conservative over there. I mean, this is going to affect job opportunity. You're not going to be seen as a victim.

Yuna went outside, it's pitch black, and in the alleyway, she does not recognize the man's face in front of the black van, but he recognized her. He grabbed her by the arms, shoved her inside the van, then he climbed in the back. He pulled out his phone, pointed it at Yuna, "Say hi to the camera!" Yuna tried to cover her face from the camera, but the guy in the backseat handed the phone to a second man. He was sitting in the driver's seat, and he kept the camera pointed directly at her.

The man in the back takes off his coat and he proceeds to R-word her as the driver is filming the whole thing. She thought that he was live streaming because he kept laughing at the comments. Or maybe he was laughing at her. We don't know. And throughout the assault, the driver demanded, What are you? Answer me. What are you? And she'd be forced to say, I'm God God's slave.

When they were done, they threw her out of the van and they sped off. And that new video was now circulating in the chat rooms. Yuna sat in her room while her phone buzzed on the table. I mean, everybody is commenting on this video, what they liked, what they didn't like, what they wanted next time. Humiliate her. I want to see her lick a toilet. We should have done more guys, like 20 at once. Ah, I want to R-word her too.

But Yuna could not leave the chat room. She had to stay because she knows that soon enough, GodGod is going to send another order for her. Whoever GodGod is, she doesn't even know GodGod, but she knows people like GodGod. And they never stop. And she knew that if she didn't do what they wanted, if she didn't comply, he would release these videos. Even though she's a victim in both videos, in this society, it would ruin her life. But what Yuna didn't know at that point was GodGod had planned this for her since the very beginning.

He had seen Yuna's social media profile and he made up in his mind that he wanted her as a slave. So he ordered her to be attacked and recorded. The random attack in the grocery store, the filming of the essay, it was all part of God God's plan. They were all planned by God God. He had personally hand selected her to be his victim. And she also didn't know at this point that she was not his only victim.

$675 is a lot of money, I think, but it's also not a lot of money. I mean, it is and it's not. It's a round-trip flight from New York City to LA for one person during a very busy season. It's also barely half of the US's average rent per month, which is around $1,400.

But that is how much God got made from running the anthromes collectively. One of the biggest, largest marketplaces for CP and torture videos on Telegram. He made $675 period. In total? In total. How long was it? Like over a year.

In total. There were originally eight nth rooms, the originals. So GodGod and an accomplice of his, they would advertise these eight rooms on Twitter. And at the start, they really only had a few people coming in, only a few moderators, a few victims, and a few anonymous guys that wanted access.

tickets would start at less than eight dollars each per chat room cheaper than a movie ticket cheaper than movie theater popcorn but that's the point god god never really cared about the money he was here mainly for the torture for the creation of these videos he was the creator of it all so while other chat rooms they had straight to the point welcoming messages like let's

If you entered the nth rooms, you would have kind of a disclaimer of sorts. God God would write, these slaves didn't follow instructions and escaped, so you may do with them as you please. And I assure you, I do not leak videos of slaves who comply with all their given orders. Signed, God God. It was weird. It's almost like he's saying that they wronged him in this game and now they need to be punished. That's why he's doing this. It's all a game to him. So let the games begin.

Most of God God's videos were about three minutes long, and in just one hour, 50 to 60 photos or videos of girls could be sent into the chat rooms. That's a lot. I mean, the list of acts that they would be forced to perform was viciously long. They were in almost every single video on all fours. They were forced to bark like a dog, sneak into men's restrooms, get and film themselves naked.

doing things to themselves not in the stall but like in the middle hoping that no one's going to come in in black sharpie they'd have to write on themselves slave itch personal toilet personal body parts a trademark of god god's abuses that the doctor would later adopt so this is something that he learned from god god

When God God got bored of having all those words on the victims, he would have them carve slave into their skin with knives. Again, something that the doctor learned from him. That was the majority of the videos. Every week, you would see the torture escalate to become more humiliating, more violent. It went from writing God God slave on their bodies to carving it and then piercing their skin with needles, including their chest.

For God God, he started with just the very specific part of a woman's chest to be pierced.

And to do that at home is very painful. To do that to yourself is very painful. But it is something that is done for some people who like it as like a stylistic choice. But of course, these girls, they didn't have a choice. They're victims in this. They were being forced. But he felt like that wasn't enough. So he wanted them to take a sewing needle and a thread and pierce it through their breast tissue and flesh and then pull it out the other end. These orders would be sent to multiple middle and high schoolers.

he'd have them grab their sewing kits and pick the largest needle, thread it with string, and grab a chunk of their flesh and just string through. like he just wanted to see... yeah. while they would say "i'm god god's slave" and their hands would be shaking, i mean

They would plunge it into their flesh and it wasn't just like a prick or a flu shot. They would have to thread the needle in and out of their flesh as if they're giving themselves stitches for a wound that doesn't even exist. They're creating a wound. And people who have gotten sutures without numbing, they say that even the needle, when it goes into your skin, it feels like you're slicing your skin away with a knife. Some sources say that God got demanded that they used a light colored thread so that he could see that they went deep enough, so much so that the thread would turn deep red.

Sometimes after tunneling through the flesh, the needle would come out on the other end and then the red thread would follow and he would force them to take off the needle. The thread is still in their body and he would get them to get the two sides of the thread, tie it to a heavy object and let it just slowly stretch their skin and it would be excruciatingly painful. He called it the skin stretching torture.

So it's like if you grabbed a piece of your belly and then threaded a needle through it and then tied, yeah. I mean, the best way I could describe it is if you were to get a belly button piercing and then hang something heavy right off of it.

At the height of the nth rooms, GodGod had personally distributed 3,762 videos. This is not including the videos shared by other users. To GodGod, this was not a business or a day job or even a way to make money. It was his hobby. And if nobody wanted to play with him, he would make them play. GodGod would later say himself that he started the nth rooms so he could relieve his stress.

And I guess viewers could tell that he's not here for the money. Because during the peak of the nth rooms, they were the gold standard in the Telegram chatroom world. Watchers could be in every other chatroom that was filled with hundreds of heinous videos and they would still want to get a link into the nth rooms.

God God was to these depraved people a legend. And that's when God God decides, I'm going to retire. I'm going to disappear at the height of the anthromes. Nobody knew why. He contacted one of his victims out of the blue and said, all of my actions were part of a game. I'm not trying to ask for forgiveness or asking you to not report it to the police. I don't care. I'm just contacting you to let you know that all the behaviors that you engaged in were just part of a fun game for me.

People that I posted on the nth room was because they ran away from the game and I had to give them a punishment, you know? After allegedly ordering a girl to slice off her breast or that part of the breast. Yeah. God God left one last message for her before he vanished and he told the victim, well, that was fun, but I have to go now. I have to go play Maple Story, which is notoriously a game that younger people play.

He would kind of make it seem like he's in high school and nobody knew if it was true. He would log off for months. He handed control to the nth rooms over to a man called the Watchman and then he vanished. God God was gone. For now.

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Once you reach your genetic height, there really is only one way to grow taller. You gotta break your legs.

Leg lengthening surgery is they're either going to break your calf bones or break your thigh bones. You pay doctors $100,000 if it's purely cosmetic. They'll knock you out and they'll, with a bone saw, they'll break your bones in half. Clean, like a dismemberment.

It takes a lot of energy for them to break it in half, by the way. The thigh bone especially is the strongest bone in the entire body. One of the strongest bones. It can withstand two grand pianos stacked on top of it. And it also makes it one of the most excruciating injuries out there. One man said, you would choose death over bone fracture in your thighs.

The pain fries your nervous system. You feel like you have two knees and one leg. I mean, it's so painful, but it gets worse. After they break your legs, you get a thick metal mechanical rod drilled into the center core of your leg bone, running the length of your leg. Like those hot dog, like pigs in a blanket. Do you know what I'm talking about? It's like a hot dog and then it's wrapped in dough. But the hot dog is the metal rod and the dough is your thigh bone. They drill it into your bone.

Inside of your bone. Like your bone marrow area. They put a little thing...

And that metal rod responds to an external remote. And every single day, you lay in the hospital bed and the doctor will press a button on the remote causing the metal rods to move apart from each other. To stretch. To stretch. It forces your two separated thigh bones to now rip away from one another in opposite directions once a day for three months. The goal is to create a small enough gap in between your leg bones that your body naturally wants to rebuild new bone over the gap.

Now, once that's done, before it heals and hardens, you rip it apart even more, causing your body to build new bone every day for three months. With one surgery, you can gain up to two to three inches. But that's if and only if your bones actually fill the broken parts. If not... Two inches? Yeah. That's it? That's it. Wow. Yeah, and if your bones don't fill the empty parts, you're just going to be left with like two knees and one leg.

And you'll likely have to go through the surgery once more if you don't grow. Now the healing time for a surgery like this is about a year. So during that time, you have to relearn how to walk, relearn how to drive, run. You can't work. But Cho, Cho Ju-bin, was never really one that cared about conventional work. As long as he could be a bit taller, he didn't care about anything.

The doctor? The doctor. The doctor had leg surgery? At 23 years old, fresh out of the military, three inches taller, he wanted to be done with work. So for a while, he tried volunteering. And now that he's stuck inside, because after his leg surgery, he can't really do anything. He's got bad knees. He finds another calling, an easier way to make money and pay off that $100,000 hospital bill. March 2019, Cho starts scribbling on his walls.

In his room. Lots of scribbles. Random variations of numbers, letters. I mean, it's illegible to everybody but himself. And when that was perfected, when he looked back into his room and he's like, this is good. He would create a chat room on Telegram. Perhaps he was inspired by a surgery or something like that because he named it the doctor's room.

Cho had been lurking on these telegram chat rooms for a while now, consuming content, but now with GodGod, the monopoly of the chat rooms gone, vanished mysteriously, he sees an opening. He feels like the keys to the kingdom are ripe for the taking, and what's a kingdom without a god? And who better to help the CP-starved population than the good old doctor? A video a day keeps the doctor away.

So one of the very first lessons that the doctor learned after starting his enterprise was a board customer is not a paying customer. Those were the rules that the doctor lived and died by. He did not want to wait to feel the watchers getting disinterested. He always knew when to keep upping the stakes, upping the fun. So one way he would do this is he would open up a new random chat room. They were so random. He would drop a brand new chat room link in all of his chat rooms, like 70 to 80 of them. And the watchers would scramble to join.

and the first message in the chat would pop up. It's from the doctor. Ding, ding. Let's play a game. Everyone tell me your dream video.

The chat quickly fills up with twisted torture ideas, creative humiliation fantasies that these people have. And once they were done, they would start playing the game. It's called the nunchi game, the social cue game. So the game involves counting from one to however many people are playing. You have to count in chronological order. So each person must say a number once, but they cannot say the same number at the same time as somebody else. So usually it's in person. You're in a circle with all of your friends. Let's say you have 30 friends. Now you're going to glance around.

and nobody's talking, then you go one, and then you glance around, and nobody's talking to you, two. You blurt out the numbers, hoping that nobody says the same number at the same time as you. Otherwise, you lose. You're eliminated. You also lose if you're the last one to say a number.

It's all about reading the room, which is kind of difficult to do when you're in a chat room. So the doctor would have the watchers play the nunchi game over and over again until they picked a winner and they would get a piece of content of their choosing. So if they wanted a quote slave to do a certain act of humiliation or if they wanted the address to go our way, that slave, they would get that for free because they won the nunchi game.

The doctor would spend a lot of time coming up with these fresh ideas for his paying customers. But there is also a downside to that. The problem with being such an ambitious business owner is that in the name of profits, sometimes you cut corners with safety. God God of the nth rooms was known for heavily vetting his users. The process of entering one of his chat rooms was lengthy. It's pricey. It's it's

It's wild. It's like a four step authentication process. First, you have to provide a picture of your male body part. That's what he calls it. Right. And with your username right next to it, then you have to provide your government issued ID and your phone number. Then the third step is the most important step for God. God, you have to provide your own piece of content in order to see the library of videos that God God has. You have to contribute to the library of videos.

God God encouraged people to film their own daughters, cousins, nieces, sisters, explicit videos of them to get access into his room. And once they passed those three steps, the final step was an entrance fee. $8. An arbitrary number that means nothing to him. It's the price of a Big Mac with a large fry and soda.

The doctor's vetting process was flipped. He would get an ID from the watchers, but the most important step for him was the payment. His rooms would start at $187 and go all the way up to $1,200. And that's just the entry fee. If you want additional bespoke, tailor-made content, there would be a fee for that as well. But the problem with the doctor's method is that guess who else has access to money and fake IDs? The police? Yes.

The police had infiltrated the chat rooms. They were in the doctor's room. They're there watching, analyzing, waiting. They're logging every piece of single content and message, just waiting for someone to slip up. I mean, come on, make a mistake. They just need an identity or even just a clue, a lead to catch the doctor.

but instead they're going to catch something else the police are staring at a new video that had been released in the chat rooms it takes them a moment to understand what they're looking at because they're so used to seeing torture videos show up on this feed and this one was almost disorienting it was of a fully clothed girl filming herself walking into a building they look up from their phones and they're like what is going on the background of that video looks like here

Earlier that day, a girl had walked into the police station to report all the things that she had endured from the doctor and his chat rooms. The police had taken her to a back room to take her statement, but they had no idea that she was recording the entire thing. The entire video was uploaded to the chat room. The police interrogation? It's not an interrogation because she's a victim. Oh, right, right, right. The police conversation? Yes. She recorded it. She uploaded it? She uploaded it because she was forced to.

It was one of the sickest videos that they would watch in the chat rooms. And sure, the victim is fully clothed. There was no physical violence in the video, but they saw how shaken she was in person, recounting every little thing that the doctor made her do. They saw how ashamed she was saying that to a room full of strange men that she'd never met before. And now that video was uploaded into the chat room.

And the doctor was sending a very, very clear message. One, I know you're in here. And two, he got off on the reliving of her trauma, forcing her to tell strangers about it. It was also a way to show her and the other victims that it doesn't matter if you report me to the cops. I'm not scared. In fact, I'm going to let you report me. And lastly, he was showing the police, see, I can have them report me. And what? You're still not going to find me.

And the worst part of it was it was true.

They knew nothing about the doctor. I mean, it seemed like he knew everything about them. He even had this knowledge room, which is like a separate chat room with a notice that read, you must be aware of the concept of police profiling. There were step-by-step methods provided for watchers, instructions on how to avoid being investigated, tips on creating new identities, using common words as nicknames to make it harder for police to track you, using anonymous sites, compressing files with a strong password. All the instructions and tips the doctors gave to the watchers

It's like he knew how the police operated and what they needed to track people. He knew their process. What did they know about the doctor? If you told the police to write down everything that they knew on a piece of paper, it would look a little goofy. It would read, he's a man in his 40s. Okay, no, maybe 50s. Perhaps he's a writer, office worker. He's well-educated for sure. In messages, the doctor would taunt the police and he would use these traditional Korean words that most young people don't even know about.

The police thought he could either be like an office worker or maybe he runs like a PI firm or maybe he does phone scams or maybe he's like a loan shark. Or again, maybe he's a writer. He could be in South Korea or China or Cambodia, but they couldn't rule out other countries definitively. So basically they had nothing on the doctor. The doctor might as well have been one of the 12.9 million men in South Korea or one of the 4 billion men in the world. But that's okay because everybody loves a good underdog story.

Within a week, a new Telegram user had risen to the ranks of one of the chat rooms, enough so that they were given the honor of managing one of the doctor's rooms. He became an accomplice. And it's very interesting because he just popped out of nowhere. He joined the chat rooms July 2019 and his username was Rabbit. And within a week, he's given the chat room.

The chat loved him. I mean, at first he would say these disgustingly bold things. He would say things like, oh, I don't do girls over 12. I also have videos of myself doing an eight-year-old. I'll post those later tonight.

But there was just something off about the rabbit. Other than the fact that he's in a CP group chat with a bunch of other men, the other guys were able to pick up on this weird energy like right away. It's like he studied the chat rooms to figure out the right things to say. He spoke like everybody else. He commented most of the same things. He used the right Ylba slang, but it's like he just did it a little too often.

If you're chatting with someone on Telegram, it lets you know when they're online or when they're last online. And Rabbit's status was always online all the time. Just blinking, blinking. Even if there was no activity in the chat, it's like he's always watching or studying what to say. Why is he always online? And the most annoying thing was he would ask the chat to hang out as if he's in a fraternity or best friend group chat. By the way, any of you losers want to meet up tonight?

No one would respond because it's like in real life. Yeah, exactly. Because at the end of the day, it's all supposed to be anonymous. The other chat members were so suspicious of him that they were convinced that either A, he's super weird or B, he's an undercover cop. Their suspicions would only grow when Rabbit would send pictures of Starbucks that he was at and like what station he was at. And he'd be like, hey, guys, if anyone comes to this Starbucks right now, coffee's on me.

Yeah. Hours would pass, nobody would show up, and then Rabbit would double text into the chat. Why did nobody come? Two chat room members responded, It'll take me six hours to get there, you f***ing R-word. Haha, enjoy your coffee alone, b***h. Rabbit realized, since he was new, maybe he needs to earn their trust. Maybe he's like, well, of course they're not going to meet up with me. They don't even know who I am. So Rabbit texted, I'm a real guy. I started college a year ago at Cheonnam National University. I swear.

No response. My vision is bad. It's like a negative three. Look, look at my medical record. He texted a picture of his medical record without his name. No answer. Rabbit would send another picture into the group chat. Guys, can you believe I failed my physical for the military? I had blood in my urine. No answer. He sends another picture of his medical records. Guys, look, they want me to go back to take my physical. I'm going to be at Chosun University Hospital on August 8th. Anybody want to come?

No respond. I mean, at this point, the rest of the chat is suspicious. Like, why is he being so direct? Why does he keep trying to meet up? Why does he not get the hint? And then one day, Rabbit disappeared. His account was no longer active and he stopped sending random texts. Rabbit was at the police station. And everybody thought, because he's a cop.

But he wasn't. He was there telling the authorities absolutely everything that he knew about the chat room. Turns out there was an undercover cop in the group chat, but it wasn't Rabbit. The police had a burner account that was flying under the radar. It was basically incognito. They weren't commenting anything. They weren't doing anything. And they weren't being suspicious because Rabbit was always taking all the attention.

And it just so happens that Rabbit had doxxed himself with his own medical records, provided evidence of distribution of CP, as well as a full confession. Wait, so what's his deal? He was just overly excited. Yeah. The police finally had their big break. They caught a rabbit.

So far, all the police had in their hunt was a rabbit. But JTBC, a giant news network in South Korea, was hunting a whale, a crypto whale. So if you remember from part one, two of the biggest South Korean news networks, JTBC and SBS, they released episodes exposing these chat rooms.

Nobody knew who the doctor or God God was, but the producers had interactions with the doctor. If you recall from part one, the doctor liked to play games with the producers. He's very confident that they would never catch him. And in an attempt to make the chase more fun, to make the game more fun, he tried to level the playing field. He showed the producers his crypto account where he collects payments for the rooms.

Then he forced a deal on them. He told them if they air the episodes, he will create victims for them. The news network's very own victims. Before SBS aired their episode, they received a video of a young underage girl fully unclothed with nothing but a plastic bag over her head and red string tied around her neck. She told the producers if they air the episode on the chat rooms, she's going to light herself on fire in front of the headquarters.

SBS aired the episode. They were able to locate the girl and secure her safety. Now, JTBC received a similar threat. If they air the episode, the doctor was going to dox a new victim in all of his chat rooms, not just his VIP rooms. Thousands of men are going to see this victim's home address, her full government name, all of her details, her work address, everything.

And what happens when all those dangerous men find it? Well, that would be on JTBC's hands. That's what the doctors said.

So this time, they don't have a victim photo or video to go off of. There's no way to secure their safety. The victim's not made yet. But JTBC aired the episode anyway because they felt like what they had on the doctor would finally bring him down. When JTBC's episode aired, the doctor's chat rooms were crazy active. They had made these episode releases an event. Everyone would grab dinner or lunch, sit down, live watch the show, and comment in the chats about it.

They'd be like, "Ding! It's on! This is gonna be fun!" They're talking bullshit from the start. God, they don't even know they're victims. She's God God's slave, not the doctor's. Isn't she in the fifth room of the nth rooms? I feel like I recognize her from there. This is so dumb. They think that she's one of the doctors. So nobody even was worried? No. Oh, here comes another one. This one's actually the doctor's. The doctor, you got way too many slaves.

The doctor would join in on the fun. Look, they're calling me a hikikomori. That's hilarious. Those are a phenomenon where people don't leave their house for years. The Korean police say that they're going to catch me. Yeah, well, we'll see about that. While the episode focused on victim stories and like the depravity of their crimes, the chat was filled with just jokes to the reporters. Hey, journalists, if you're in here watching this right now, thanks for making us famous. This is another good one. We love this episode. Can't wait to see all the newcomers coming in.

To them, the doctor is a whale and the producers and the police, I mean, they're like little ants. They're just having fun with them, that's all, entertaining their sad attempts at picking a fight. Or at least that's how they felt. Until the JTBC episode cut to a producer standing in front of a crypto exchange center in Seoul. Wait, is that? The reporters announced that they received a tip that the doctor would use this very crypto exchange center to turn his crypto payments from his viewers into cash.

The chat starts blowing up. The messages are moving so fast by the time that you read one, it's already gone. Another message has taken its place. They found best coin. No way. Everybody who sent money is so freaking screwed. They're going to know who the depositors are. What are we going to do now, doctor? Hello? What are we going to do? Are we? The doctor ranted to the chat rooms. Is this really okay for producers to be ruining a man's business like this?

But I digress. I know that many of you guys are worried after watching the show. Many of you guys have asked if we're going to be okay. And I've proven myself time and time again. I have overcome a lot. You can trust me and join these rooms. The watchers were hesitant. They can trace the doctor's crypto. Does that mean that they can trace him? Wait, no, right? Because crypto is untraceable, right?

Crypto is so untraceable that it's inevitably traceable. Okay, let me explain. Bitcoin and Ethereum are considered transparent blockchains, meaning everybody's wallet is publicly visible on the blockchain. You can see every transaction that's ever made, but you cannot see who the wallet owners are. So if you were able to find out whose wallet that is, then yeah, theoretically, you could see how much they have in that wallet and their transaction history. But again, you don't know whose wallet they're transacting with.

So you get a little bit of information, but not the full picture. Now you have Monero. It's another cryptocurrency, but it's different in the sense that it's called a privacy coin, meaning no one knows how much you have in your wallet. No one knows how much you sent, how much you received, to which addresses you sent to and to which addresses sent to you. So if nobody knows the doctor's Bitcoin or Ethereum wallet and the doctor's crypto is untraceable and because Monero is a privacy coin, it's nearly impossible to track, then...

he should be fine, right? But then there's a problem with the exchange center. Because most places do not accept crypto as a payment, at least as of right now. Like I can't walk into Trader Joe's and buy soup dumplings and exchange it with Bitcoin.

The most popular ways that people can actually spend their crypto is to now bring the money back on the paper trail. And typically there's two ways to do that. One, you sell the crypto and you transfer the funds into your bank account. Or two, you go to an exchange center and you literally cash out on your crypto. You exchange your crypto for cash, basically like crypto ATMs, which is what the producers found. They found which crypto exchange center the doctor uses.

but the doctor is way too smart to walk into the crypto exchange center and exchange his crypto for cash by himself right so there's no way that they could track the doctor

The doctor would send others to exchange crypto into cash. In the Korean crime world, it's called a money-thrower, so it's like a money throw, if you will. So the doctor will send out a little bit of crypto to all his little errand boys. They will go exchange the crypto into cash at the exchange center, drop off the cash for the doctor at a specific drop point, and then for their work, most of them would receive free access to torture videos.

Which if they know which crypto exchange center the doctor uses, does that mean they can follow the doctor by following the money? It was enough for the police to get a solid lead. They knew about which exchange center and now they had a tip come in that the doctor had a favorite errand boy that he liked to use for throwing money. A nine-year-old boy.

No way. Yeah. So in theory, most crimes can be solved by following the money. If the police are following the money, would they just follow this little nine-year-old boy that walked into the crypto exchange center? Is that what they have to do? That would lead them to a fire hydrant in a random apartment building in the city, like a fire extinguisher thing. The investigators are crammed into the CCTV room and they're watching old footage at a random apartment building outside of Seoul. They're like, wait, what is that?

So everybody's leaning in and they see this pixelated figure inside of the elevator. It's so pixelated, you can't even really tell if it's a male or a female or anything, really. You just know that they're dressed in dark clothes and they're holding this package, maybe like a brick-sized package. And that's it.

But what's so interesting about it, well, the police say, keep watching. And they see this figure carry their little package out the door. And as they're exiting the elevator, they hit close door, the button. So they want the door to close quickly. Yeah. And that's weird. The only CCTV cameras in the entire building are in the main lobby and in the elevators. There are no cameras in the hallways.

So whatever they're doing, once they get out on this floor, they don't want the CCTV cameras to see. So they keep investigating and they could see that the elevators did not close on time. There's only two apartments on this floor and that person was not headed towards either of them. They were headed towards the stairwell. Why take the elevator then go to the stairwell?

Right. Doesn't make any sense. When the authorities go to that stairwell, they find a silver door. It's a fire extinguisher box. So in South Korea, the fire extinguisher boxes are not see-through like the American ones. It's like a metal locker that can be opened and closed by anyone. But at the same time, nobody can see through it and nobody just like goes around opening fire extinguisher boxes. It's the only spot that made sense.

This is the money drop location. They found this area by tailing the little nine-year-old and then they found other people coming in and out and leaving money in this fire extinguisher box. It's very interesting. They found various different people coming in to drop off money, like 17-year-olds, 19-year-olds, nine-year-olds. There were a lot of different people involved, all doing money drops. But only one person was taking the money out every single time.

But there was no way that that was the doctor. Because the police were looking at a schoolgirl with a brown brick-like paper package in her hands, headed out. She's the only one that took money out of that fire extinguisher box. It was a girl. A little girl. When they follow her with unmarked cars, plainclothes officers, the hunt is on. They follow this schoolgirl from a distance. They watch her hand off the brown package to another guy. And they both immediately separate.

So now the majority of the officers are tailing after the guy because he's the next link in the money drop. Like the girl's just going back home. The guy has a baby face, a rice bowl haircut. The police hoped that maybe he's one or two links away from the doctor. They think that they're going to catch the doctor today. And immediately after taking the money from the school girl, the guy, let's call him guy one, takes the money straight to another guy, guy two. Guy two is a bit older. Maybe this is the doctor.

But as the police watch, they realize guy one is not passing the money off to guy two. Guy two is giving guy one more money. The money ends with guy one.

Guy Won shoves the package into his bag and walks over to a booth where people are protesting. He chats with a few of the protesters and they pass him a clipboard and he scribbles on it. On it, it would read, name, Cho Ju Bin, birthday, October 14th, 1995, and his cell phone number. The police went from having nothing on the doctor to having his full name, date of birth, and phone number. Wait, what is he doing? He's signing a petition.

To do what? To petition? It's like one of those petitions of like, please, climate change, petition. He signed a petition. For no reason. Huh. Yeah. And they knew this has got to be the doctor. He was the end of the money link. The money was never passed off. They kept watching him. It ended with him.

Authorities locate this man's house and they start staking it out. Now, they can't barge in because he could easily delete telegram or even log out, which again would delete all the evidence. He could throw all of his phones into the toilet. He could destroy things. They would have to arrest him while he was out of the house to make sure that they could preserve all the evidence that was inside. March 16th, 2020.

like a year after he starts his telegram, the perfect opportunity comes. Mr. Cho is going to teach his 24-year-old son, Cho Ju-bin, how to ride a bike. They did not know they have a full audience. He's learning how to ride a bike because he has to relearn how to do all these things because of his leg lengthening surgery.

This is crazy. Yeah. They were about 40 police officers working to catch his every movement. They had officers nearby the subway, the bus routes, another group sitting near his home. And right before Cho and his dad entered the house, they were stopped by the police and arrested. He was brought into the police station where he argued, I am not the doctor. And then he tried to swallow a pen and die. Yeah. I mean, the police had so much evidence against Cho, though, and he knew it. He very quickly, same day, admits, you know what? I am, in fact, the doctor. Yeah.

We want to know about the cash that's stuffed into the shoeboxes, the crypto wallets, the second phone that we found squeezed in between your couch cushions. What's the password? To what? The second phone. What's the password? Sushi. Excuse me? I want to eat sushi. I was going to go eat sushi with my dad, but you arrested us after our bike ride, so I didn't get the chance to eat sushi.

If you get me sushi, maybe I might tell you my password. Wow. After sushi, he was too tired to let them know the password. The next day came around. Tell us the password. Doesn't matter. Black bean noodles? Doctor nodded.

The day after, it was burgers. For 30 days, it was like he was asking for a different food each time. He never told them the password. The authorities would actually find the password themselves. One of the first things that the police noticed when they searched Cho's house were the writings on the wall. Literally, his entire bedroom was filled with scribbles all over the walls. And they didn't seem like scribbles of someone who had lost their grasp on reality and they're like losing their minds. This felt very intentional. Like the scribbles are meaning something. Like the numbers and the letters, they all point to something. And

And they did. I mean, the police just didn't know what. They didn't spell out anything that they could string together. So when Cho didn't give them the password, they went back to the writings on the wall. Maybe he hid the password somewhere here. But where? I mean, the probability of us finding the password is like slim to none.

I mean, he's still going to be a creature of comfort, though, of convenience. We all are. So they check the writing near his desk where he might be using his phone. No, nothing. They check the writing near the couch. There is no writing near the couch that's in the living room. So nothing. The police look around the bed. I mean, he would use his phone in bed, right? They start scanning through the writings on the wall and none of them are working. They're like, try this one. Not working. Try this one. Not working. Then where the hell is the password? And then they look up.

All the officers' heads slowly turned, and on the ceiling was more writing. A password. It would unlock his second phone. In the photo album of the second phone were the personal IDs of many of his victims. Explicit pictures and videos were found of over 90 different victims just on this one phone.

In a surprising conversation between the doctor and God God of the Nth Rooms, God God suggested if we go down, we should take all the victims down with us. The authorities had caught the doctor before he could make any videos public. But now, now they need to catch God God because it seems like he's planning to take down all the victims with him.

Experts who had been in the chat room stated, "If Cho, the doctor, did this for the sake of money, GodGod did it simply for the sake of having fun." Unlike the doctor, he had spread around the videos and photos pretty freely to other people just so that he could further hurt his victims. If he knew that giving everyone the free videos was gonna hurt his victims even more, he would have done it in a heartbeat.

And there's this saying, if you can't beat them, you got to join them. So that's what Team Red was here to do. Team Red is like the anonymous of South Korea. They are literally anonymous hackers. They saw the SBS and JTBC episodes on God God and they wanted to help. They offered their services to the police. They're like, we're going to catch God God for you. They're like, how are you going to do that? We've been trying to catch God God for like over a year now. We're going to do it by doing what he does. We're going to go fishing.

A phishing link with a ph, phishing, is like setting bait for your catch. You send a link, and oftentimes the link looks like a legitimate well-known website, like a link to a cybercrimes investigative unit or Twitter. They look legit. Now, side note, those were God God's favorite links to send to victims to get all their personal information. So God God played into his victims' anxieties. He would threaten to tell their parents about their photos or threaten to arrest them for producing pornography.

which is illegal in South Korea. And because they were so anxious to not get in trouble, his victims would click on these suspicious links. And that's exactly what Team Red would do. They would message into the chat room. Hey, God God, there's been a new tip line opened up. They've been collecting information about you through this link. The preview of the link read SBS collecting information about the Nth rooms. God God's finger hovered over the blue link and then he clicked.

They were in. Team Red now had access to his IP address, which Wi-Fi network that he was using and the exact cell phone model he was using. Just like that. One click. One click. That's scary. The police would use those key factors to pinpoint his location and they would go hunt down God God. They were led to a junkyard and in the midst of all the trash, they see a man standing there in front of them with like 10 to 15 phones just in his arms.

The police sees his phones. They handcuff him. They get a full view of his shirt. It's like a black whale on his shirt. Just like a whale shirt. Yeah.

And the police had literally caught their way. It was so anticlimactic. The police said it didn't even feel real. The god god, who is now finally in custody. I mean, it was so clear. He's no god. He also had a very similar complexion to Cho, the doctor. So both were on the quote heavier side with moon shaped faces. That's how they're described by media. They're both very young, only 24. Both of them. They're both like in college or just graduated.

That's so crazy how identical they are. They're both really smart too. They both had really great grades in college and got into pretty prestigious colleges. God God was an architecture student. Yeah. And Cho was a writing student. Very interesting, right? Is that why they thought Cho was really good at writing? Yeah, and he would use all these very traditional Korean words that no young people use. That's why they thought he was 50. I see. But he's actually 24. Yeah.

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Lockdown. One in 100 men. That is the estimate that netizens were circulating after this case went viral. 260,000 users of the doctor's room and the nth rooms. The population of Korea is 51 million people. That is one in 200 people or one in 100 men.

technically half the viewers of these chat rooms were not even Korean. They were foreigners. But that would still mean one in every 200 men could have been a viewer of these chat rooms. And then if you take all the kids and that the number even gets crazier. Crazier.

Ordinary women who have never even imagined something like this could take place, they're forced to face the idea that someone that they know, someone at work, their boss, their pastor, their husband, brother, dad, son, could be a watcher. I mean, it felt like full chaos in the city. Churches are praying for the cleansing of the nation. Wives, girlfriends, sisters are demanding to go through family members' phones trying to find any evidence that they had visited these chat rooms. Other parents are frantically checking their children for injuries, like trying to force them to prove that they didn't harm themselves for videos.

School administrators are busy trying to prevent students from circulating articles and speculations of who could have been in the nth rooms. Vigilante justice websites are popping up everywhere accusing random people of being nth room watchers. Some of them weren't even watchers. Some of them were.

Colleagues are accusing each other of being watchers. People are terrified of clicking any link that looks suspicious because what if it downloads those videos onto their phone? I mean, how is anybody going to sleep comfortably at night knowing that these types of chat rooms exist and that one in every 200 men in Korea could have been on these chat rooms?

So netizens, they demand a few things from the get-go. One, they want the perpetrator's identities to be released. Okay, so in South Korea, there is a seven-person committee that votes on whether or not criminals' identities should be released to the public. Most criminal identities, by default, are kept private.

So it's not like the US. They have to meet four criteria to even think about publicizing their identities. The four criteria are: the crime has to be violent and cruel, there must be sufficient evidence to prove the suspect has committed the crime, disclosure of the identity is for the public good, and the suspect has to be an adult. So those four things. Second, they want all identities of all watchers, of all users of the chat rooms to be released.

And third, they want the perpetrators to get the book thrown at them. They want them in prison for life. First request, release all identities of all the perpetrators. This part was a bit convoluted and not that pertinent in the grand scheme of things. But the doctor's identity was actually revealed because the police told the press that they're going to do a COVID test on an inmate who is suspected of being the doctor of the telegram chat rooms. At that point, the press didn't even know they made an arrest.

They just made a press release that there was an inmate that they need to test for COVID. And his crime is being the suspect for being the doctor of the Telegram chat rooms. So the press is like, we didn't even know that you made an arrest on that. So they start going crazy. Like, why would you hide this from us? Why are you hiding his identity? People were rioting on the streets. A petition was signed by over 5 million people to release the perpetrator's full identities and even the watcher's identities. God, God, move.

Moon was brought to the public for the first time after his arrest and his face was publicized, his name was publicized. There were cameras flashing around his face, reporters were asking him, "Would you like to say anything?" I want to tell the victims and their families that I'm sorry. What was the purpose of your crimes? I think that I had corrupt ethics. What's your relationship with Cho Ju-bin, the doctor? I don't know him.

As the police escorted him into the car, he would just repeat, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, all over again. But it's so empty. He would even argue, well, I only received $675 for the videos. I mean, it's not that big of a deal. I didn't even make a lot of money. That made him worse. Yeah.

but his statement was considered tame compared to that of the doctors. After both of their identities were released, the doctor made a statement. He was first seen in public with a neck brace on because he kept trying to harm himself. He had a band-aid on his head. Okay, the reason I'm kind of like laughing at that is not because I think anything is funny, but it's so ridiculous. He just kept trying to harm himself in ways that were very clearly not harmful. Like he just had a band-aid on his head and you just know that there's like no wound or barely any wound there.

Yeah. And also, I think at this point, it's one of those situations where who cares if he's in pain? Like nobody cared. None of the netizens cared. Like boohoo. We don't care. Now he comes out to the public and at first his his face is blank. He's just not making eye contact, staring out. And the first thing he would say is an apology.

but not to the victims of the chat rooms. He would say, I genuinely apologize to everyone who has suffered harm because of me, including JTBC president Son Seok-hee, Mayor Yoon Chang-yeon, and journalist Kim Moon. This is a different one from the last episode. Different journalist.

People were like, what? Why is he apologizing to not the victims? And why is he apologizing to these three people? This is so random. So in his whole, in the whole quest to find out who the doctor was, these three people, he was like blackmailing them. He was stirring up shit. He was starting rumors. The chat rooms were attacking them. And now these three people have the influence and the political weight to impact his case.

So that's it's speculated. That's why he was publicly apologizing to them. The mayor, the JTBC president that controls the media, one of the major media networks of South Korea, another journalist that's been on this case since the get go. The reporters asked him, OK, a lot of your victims are underage. Do you feel guilty about that at all? He just responded. Thank you for putting a break on the life of a devil that cannot be stopped.

Netizens and experts analyzed his statement and that would really be one of the few statements that he would make in regards to his actions. They said by referring to himself as a devil, it seems like he was trying to put himself up on a pedestal. He wasn't saying devil as in I'm so bad, but it was almost as he's boasting that his deeds were unparalleled. That there was God God, but he's the devil.

South Koreans were not content with the release of the perpetrators' identities. They wanted the identities of the watchers to be released as well. So petitions with millions of signatures were being circulated and signed to demand a release,

There was shockingly some pushback on this. Some netizens were complaining, I feel like I'm being treated very unfairly right now that I can't even go to sleep. I don't see what's so wrong with watching adult content that I rightfully paid for on the nth rooms. Rather than punishing the users of the nth rooms, they should go after the girls who filmed themselves to begin with because producing videos, explicit videos in South Korea is illegal. So technically they're breaking the law.

Police? Yeah. He just... Outed himself. Another netizen wrote that he was a victim by watching those videos. He said now he carries psychological stress of not reporting the videos when he should have. He said because he never reported it and now that it was exposed, he feels like people are going to think that he's a watcher, which he was. Yeah. But like now he has a lot of psychological stress and he feels pretty victimized. Yeah. Yeah.

Others probably commented that they would never get caught. They said, well, I watched it all on a Google Drive and I actually never downloaded the video. So good luck, idiots. I think so many people sign also probably comes from they want to know who's around their family, right? Because that's scary. You know, I'm sure a good chunk of them, you could probably listen to the way they talk and what they do. And you're like, yeah, you're definitely a watcher of the anthromes. But I'm sure a big chunk of them don't.

No one would suspect. Everyone would be shocked. Because what's in my mind is like, you know how we were in Korea, like you go on subways? Yeah. Look at how many people. And then you think about, bro, you're just like rubbing shoulders with them. I also wonder if a lot of people would bring up anthroms on purpose. Like I feel like I would have done that. Just to kind of gauge energies of people. Just to see how they react. Yeah.

And that's kind of interesting because people were circulating tips for the watchers on how not to get caught. So one of the threads going around was a list of all the petitions that were being made demanding harsher punishment and the release of all the identities of the users. The thread suggested that if you were a watcher, you should sign all the petitions with your government name. So in Korea, you sign them like with your government name. Because naturally, I guess human psychology would make the watchers want to distance themselves as far away as possible.

So it was argued actually in these threads, like when people talk about Nth room, don't say things like, oh no, I don't keep up with news like that because immediately you're weird, you're suspicious. So the threads were advising instead of distancing yourself from the case, you should lean into it. Don't shy away from it. You want to support the fight for justice so that nobody suspects you. Then there were some netizens who felt upset by the telegram news because they never got a chance to watch it.

They started taking to Pornhub and other explicit adult websites to see what the videos were about. The week of when the news of the nth rooms really exploded, all these explicit adult websites had a spike in searches that included variations of the words telegram, nth room, chat room, Korean high school, Korean middle school, Korean chat room, middle school.

and this was not just in South Korea, it wasn't just South Koreans searching this, this was happening globally so after hearing the horrors of the nth room, there were people who wanted to see it for themselves for the pleasure when the trending searches were exposed, netizens were freaking out they were commenting "can't they track the people who search for that too? what the f*ck?" these people need to stop pretending to be human, you guys are all disgusting why are they even alive? like really, this is insane, you must be out of your minds

An Edison would create a Blue House petition asking for the creation of a cyber sex crime division, harsher prison sentences for offenders, and the need for joint internal investigations for these crimes. It would get over 100,000 signatures very quickly. Now, one congressman would say in response, does every petition have to become a law? Another politician was asked about his opinion on the Anthrim case, and he responded nonchalantly, I'm not too familiar, but perhaps the performer...

he's talking about the victim used it as an artistic outlet another congressman said if i'm only consuming these videos for self-pleasure is there a reason to be prosecuted if i alone paint a picture i can't be prosecuted for the law wait these are politicians i feel like they just outed themselves yeah precisely yeah what exactly my thoughts

And this case wasn't just impacting the country on a big national political scale. It was infiltrating young people's everyday lives, like everybody's lives, not even just the victims. And I say that not to emphasize like, oh, there's other victims because I don't like the victims of the Anthurium cases are the victims of the Anthurium cases. I think there's a lot of collateral damage that was done to the society and to families. But I don't know if I would categorize them as victims. Right.

But just to show you the big widespread implications of this case, there's an anonymous forum where a lot of college students and high schoolers will go. This one high school girl posted on there and she went by the username Miss A. She said that she had a dilemma in her personal life.

She said she had been dating this guy and he confessed to her the other day. Hey, you know the Anthrim thing that's been going around? Well, I saw the videos, but I didn't know that the girls were being forced to do all those things. I thought they were just making it for, you know, consumption. I thought it was just like explicit material they were making. The girl posted that she felt really gross about his response because she wrote, I mean, the videos weren't normal, you know, like normal.

You can't really... They're doing explicitly weird and terrible things. And not to mention, like, I heard that when you see the Anthem videos, you can just tell that they're not of age. Like, it's very obvious. So she told the forum that she immediately confronted her boyfriend and said, it doesn't matter if you knew or not. Like, these... Just the fact that you watched it is weird. She stated that she broke up with him and he got very angry. And he was so angry that she wasn't trying to be considerate and understand his side of the story. She wanted to ask the audience...

Am I the asshole for breaking up with him? One rapper in South Korea went by the stage name Simba. And nobody asked, but he posted on Instagram saying, The more the situation for the nth room becomes intense, the more we need to be level-headed instead of becoming hot-headed with emotion. I hope there will be a cold and realistic punishment for the perpetrators.

Yes, this is a case that has become a hot issue among citizens. But that does not mean the users should all be sentenced to life. That would not be fair. Plus, that would be overlooking the precedent. You know, just because we're angry about the case does not mean that we should increase the punishment. This could mean later if and when your son or your brother ends up getting caught watching some pornography.

that their consequences will be based on the results of this very case. What if this case becomes a new standard for society and they all get sentenced to life for watching explicit videos? This is so much more than about us being upset and wanting the perpetrators to pay.

the public reaction went as well as you would imagine people were flooding his instagram with comments asking him if he was one of the 260 000 some said just keep your mouth shut okay if you don't know what you're talking about this random ass rapper if my brother gets caught watching like this getting sentenced to life isn't gonna happen to him because i'm gonna kill him myself

Other netizens tried to reason with him. They said, what if your sister or your girlfriend or your mother gets tricked into this crime and becomes a victim of these perpetrators? Would you still want them to be punished reasonably? Like, have you thought about it like that?

The rapper responded to the comments and he doubled down. My dear feminist friends, if it makes you feel better, then go ahead and leave your hate here. I can't understand why such great people with great ideals don't have real Instagram accounts, but whatever. I can only assume that you can't read long statements because you're all stupid and lazy, but I'm truly amused by the fact that you thought that I meant, quote, I need my right to watch porn. I guess now the world knows that you guys don't have the brains. Ha, you know what? Go ahead. Fine.

all the doctor related people even the ones who watched and have them killed i never watched it so people would end up dying at least six people self-exited in connection with the anthroon case they were exposed as watchers of the anthroons and they were scared of the consequences of their actions yeah they could not stomach the idea of dealing with the consequences but they could stomach the visuals of hundreds of girls being tortured so i mean do without what you will

It felt like every other day, news was breaking that another person had self-exited. Netizens had a lot of mixed reactions. Some felt bad for the families that they were breaking up. Not saying that these people deserve to get off scot-free, like they deserve to be in prison for very long times, but it was likely a shock to wives, mothers, sisters, children. I mean, they were all collateral damage in all of this.

And then another rapper got in trouble for the exact opposite reason as Simba. So after the news broke that six men had taken their lives over the concerns that they would be exposed as watchers of the anthromes, one rapper wrote, this is making me so happy. If more of them die, I'll write a commemorative song. Let's all reveal all their identities. He even added a story of the Han River saying, let's go. This is the Han River, kiddos. Talking to the people who are watching.

And a lot of, he had mixed responses from netizens. Some netizens called him out for having a song 10 years ago that referenced underage SA. He was also found to be drunk driving a few years back, so he doesn't have the cleanest reputation. Others just analyzed the intention behind his message and they said that he was encouraging self-exiting. Others felt kind of torn. They said, tough call. I mean, on one hand, we shouldn't celebrate. But on the other hand, that person is trash who contributed to the victimization of women and children, so...

Another reads, I wouldn't necessarily cheer for their deaths, but I sure as hell would not shed a tear for them either. The police tracked down 124 people in relation to the crimes and 18 people were formally detained. The doctor and God God were sick, but these guys were just as depraved and sick for helping these two.

One of them, Ahn Sung-jin, helped God God, and he alone had distributed over a thousand child exploitation videos. He even essayed a 12-year-old girl. And when he was asked, why would you do that? He said he R-worded her out of, quote, simple curiosity. Wow, try to imagine saying that as an answer. Yeah, I don't even...

And it's very interesting. I think the analyzation of these two perpetrators, the doctor and God God, is that the doctor, Cho, is the definition of an incel. He hates women. He wants money. He wants power. And to a degree, he wants to be loved by a woman. But probably they have to fit a very unrealistic, bizarre idea that he has of what a woman is.

He has bone-deep insecurities. Literally, he would break his bones and undergo one of the most painful cosmetic surgeries on the market just to be like three inches taller. He's 5'7", by the way, after his surgery.

Yeah, he's willing to risk not being able to walk, not being able to do anything for a year after that surgery. So he's deeply insecure and he also has a tendency to blame women collectively for everything bad in his life. He also has a clear fixation on money and power. Money gives him the power and that's his end goal. He's chasing the power. All of those combined create the definition of an incel. The doctor was an incel who wanted money and power, but God, God, he was just a sadist.

He just got off on the pain. It wasn't even really the power. It was just the pain. So it's the case of the incel and the sadist. And all of Korea wanted to see them burn.

But just because you want a bonfire doesn't mean you're going to get one. If Dr. N. God God had posters on their walls of their biggest inspiration or hero, it would probably be a tiny Korean guy in a baseball cap. His name is Son Jung-woo. We're going to call him Jung-woo. And he got away with running the world's biggest, most prolific CP website on the history of the internet. He was only 21 years old.

Authorities who worked on this case stated by volume there were more CP videos on his one website than they had seen on any other dark website before this. And it was confirmed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that half the videos on there were originals. They were unique pieces of data that had never been seen before, meaning they had been made for the sole purpose of being uploaded to Chungwoo's website.

So he, this was before Nth Room? He was arrested a year before Nth Room. And that's why his name comes up a lot when the doctor and God God were being arrested because they were assuming, netizens were assuming that their sentencing is going to be very similar to his sentencing. Now, the website that Chungwoo had was called Welcome to Video. And unlike the Nth Room and the doctor's room, you had to be on the dark web to access it. The banner of the website read, Do not upload adult content.

Because the creator, Jungwoo, wanted CP. He wanted mainly videos of infants.

At its peak, the website had 1.2 million members and over 250,000 unique videos. Again, that means videos that were not seen anywhere else on the dark web prior to this. New victims, new acts of violence produced exclusively for this website. Content was downloaded over a million times. Users were encouraged to upload their own videos. Chungwoo, the founder, would encourage users to kidnap infants, film them R-wording the infants for the sake of producing content for his website.

And they did. So a lot of FBI investigators who tried to take down Welcome to Video, they said, you know, you're kind of expecting videos of maybe people that are in the teen range, 13, 16. The most popular search terms were one-year-old, two-year-old, four-year-old, young infant, and babies. Oh my God.

The youngest children being abused on that site were only six months old. In exchange for this type of content being uploaded, Jungwoo, the creator, would give those users rewards points, which could be exchanged for video downloads. So they ran very similar to the Telegram chat rooms. It's speculated that the Telegram chat room creators, GodGod, the doctor, they were inspired by Welcome to Video. So we think that the doctor is inspired by GodGod, but perhaps they were both inspired by Jungwoo from Welcome to Video.

But he was caught. Yeah. So Welcome to Video actually flew under the radar for a really long time on the dark web. And it wasn't even discovered by South Korean authorities. And it's not even just a South Korean. The founder, I don't want to say founder. I don't know what other word to use.

Chung-woo, right? He's South Korean, but this was a global issue. Like this was discovered because people in other foreign nations were getting arrested and they found welcome to video on their computers. It was terrifying. Like they had never seen anything like this before. The US gets involved and oddly enough, the IRS would be the ones to take down the website because it's financial fraud. Yeah, the IRS has like their own investigation team.

It's crazy. So 337 people would be arrested. The network of video production spanned across at least 38 countries and at least in 23 states. A lot of the watchers had very alarming occupations. One was a federal agent for Homeland Security. Another was a vice principal of a high school in Georgia. One man ran a daycare in Kansas. There were former congressional aides, a former border patrol agent, which side note, this border patrol agent is absolutely vile.

Authorities found that he had an active GoFundMe running where he was raising funds to adopt his wife's daughter from a previous relationship. He's like, this is my stepdaughter and I want to formally adopt her. He was simultaneously, as he has that GoFundMe, simultaneously uploading videos of himself fully abusing that stepdaughter on videos on Welcome to Video while presenting to the world that he was this hardworking guy who needed the funds to adopt her.

Another guy that was caught with Welcome to Video on his computer had 450,000 hours of CP on his hard drives. 450,000 hours. You could watch his collection of videos for 51 years without ever repeating or stopping for a single second. 51 years. 5-1. Another man, a father of two, was caught being a buyer of Welcome to Video and when they went to arrest him in his house, they found hidden cameras all over his house to film his children's friends when they came over to shower and use the restroom.

So Welcome to Video was a CP operation that led hundreds of people being arrested from all over the world. I mean, it was used internationally. At least 300 were arrested in the US, as well as other arrests were made in Finland, France, UK, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Saudi Arabia, in total at least 38 different countries. It's estimated that there were over a million registered users. When it came to Welcome to Video's founder, though, the judge in South Korea said, he's young.

He was 21 when he started. He's 23 when he was caught, similar to the doctor and God, God. He's an adult. Yes, but he has no criminal history and he's reflecting on himself. What are you talking about? He also has a wife that he must support. He was given 18 months in prison. 18, one eight, not two years, like one year and a few, one and a half years.

Korea just don't care about... Yeah, well, the judges don't care. The citizens care a lot. Right. Yeah. He was even asked why he created the website and he responded, well, I thought child videos would make more money than adult videos. Even his dad said, it's not like he killed somebody. What's the big deal? I'm just not going to let him use the computer anymore. Wow. Yeah, so...

Side note, the laws in South Korea are horrendously written when it comes to crimes against children. But not just like South Korea thinks like this. It's just the law. I mean, there were massive petitions nonstop. Every South Korean is so confused because they were saying, we get longer time for smoking weed in Korea. Like, what do you who are you guys protecting in this country? Like, this infuriates me. A lot of Koreans were saying, send him to the U.S. because the U.S. wanted him. The U.S. said extradite him to us.

We're going to charge him in the United States. And if he was charged in the US, he's looking at like 75 years to life and probably going to get murdered in prison. Yeah. South Koreans were saying, send him, extradite him. He's going to get his shit rocked in prison. That's what the netizen comments are reading.

South Koreans were protesting, arguing, who are these laws made for? They're not made for the citizens. They're not made for the children. A lot of South Korean netizens were asking, it feels like the judges won't change the laws because they participate in these activities. And if they get caught, they don't want harsh punishments. That's what it feels like because why else would you not change it? It doesn't make any sense. South Korea denied the U.S.'s request for extradition. Yeah, they said that they needed to investigate him for illegal gambling.

gambling is illegal in south korea and they said he used some of his profits from welcome to video to gamble and that's illegal yeah he made a few million dollars while the site was up which is crazy and he used some of that money to gamble and he was sentenced to two years additionally which is six more months than what he got for the distribution of cp so illegal gambling he got two years for cp and running one of the craziest dark web cp websites he got a year and a half

Yeah, and he was not extradited to the US. Wait, so when was this? This was 2018, a year before God, God, and the Doctor. Is he out? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So... What? It's absolutely insane. Yeah.

So if there's any comparison to the amount of time that the doctor and God God are gonna get, this was the best case reference. And South Koreans were terrified. I mean, they were scared that this was gonna happen again. Netizens were commenting, "When I played Monopoly growing up, I used to wonder if there really was such a thing as get out of jail cards and if they existed in real life." And it turns out they do. In our country, Korea, it's just called having a penis.

Prosecutors requested life sentences for both, arguing that these crimes were unprecedented in history and that Cho, the doctor, clearly had zero remorse. Netizens really hoped that the government would listen. I mean, they were commenting, I hope these two get sent to the nth circle of hell. And in the end, the doctor, Cho, was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

That's it. The judge said his behavior has caused extreme pain on the victims and they are demanding of severe punishment. So I guess in their minds, technically compared to the previous cases like Welcome to Video, it was a lengthier sentence, but it's really nothing in the grand scheme of things.

It would later be appealed and he would get 42 years. Meanwhile, God God was sentenced to only 34 years in prison. It's speculated that he was actually given less time because he didn't have strong financial gains from his crimes, which I feel like the opposite happens

it's like he's even i don't know a lot of yeah a lot of netizens argue he's worse because he wasn't even doing it for money he was literally doing it for the sake of it yeah one victim said why can't they just seek the death penalty against them what happens if they get released for being model prisoners then what and then august 2021 a blog went up on naver and it was titled i'm cho ju bin aka the doctor of telegram

There would be a total of six articles posted and the blog would open. I opened this blog and Instagram account as channels to express my opinion, which is the truth. I know I'm offending people writing this stuff, but I'm not trying to deny my sins. I want to selflessly admit what I did wrong. Wait, this was when he's in jail? Yeah. What? His dad was doing it for him.

What? Cho admitted that he produced and distributed abusive material. However, he did not agree that the chat rooms were like a crime ring. He also believed that because some of the evidence was illegally collected by the police, that meant that he can't really be charged with that evidence. He can't, like that would, that shouldn't have been in the trial. When it comes to his sentencing, Cho, the doctor, asked us the question of, he asked the public. See, it's so funny. Like, okay, you're doing illegal shit. Yeah. That's illegal. Yeah. So you're not following the law.

And now you turn around, you're like, by law, those are not legal. So the police can't legally. Yeah. It's like, it's so dumb. It's so dumb. And he asks the public, the trial is over and I can't turn back time. Even if I talk for a hundred days, it's not going to do me any good. So trust me just once. Let go of your doubts. 42 years in prison. That's the weight I have to bear. Was what I did really that bad?

And also, is it okay to mock someone like this? Does this make sense? Do you think this case is resolved because of my sentence? No, it's wrong. This even shows more that he has no concept of what he did. It's unfair to receive such a long sentence. He stated that the victim's statements were not true and that he was unfairly and heavily sentenced. He said the sentence against me is a declaration that the law has been defeated by public opinion. What a joke. Yeah.

He has zero remorse. And I don't think any of them are going to get any vigilante justice in prison either. South Korea has pretty relaxed prisons compared to the U.S. And there does not seem to be a strong association with offenders getting poetic justice behind bars. The Dr. Cho even had time in prison to make a pen pal. Do you guys remember the child star killer case we covered recently? A child star married a man, ended up cheating on him, and he mysteriously died in a cliff jumping incident. He became her pen pal.

giving her tips on how not to incriminate herself and how she should not talk to the police. She should not work with the police. So yeah, I don't think he feels any remorse. One citizen wrote, since our country does not have the willpower to punish these criminals, at least send them to the US or send them to North Korea. Send them to the correctional centers there. We don't have to spend our money, our taxpayer money. We can just outsource these things since it doesn't seem like we're going to improve our system anytime soon.

There were some small amendments made to the CP laws in South Korea after this case. They made changes so that possessing, purchasing, and viewing illegal content would have imprisonment up to three years, or you could be fined $23,000. Those who plan to commit SA, so you know how in the chat rooms they're like planning to commit SA? Wait, you only get three years? Yeah. So those who plan to commit SA would be sentenced up to three years, and the age of consent was raised from 13 to 16 years old.

But is this really enough to stop the chat rooms? Reporter Kim from the first episode said, every day there were dozens of different chat rooms appearing and disappearing, copycat rooms, spinoff rooms. I mean, at the time of our investigation, there were hundreds of rooms with some variation of the nth room in their names, even if they weren't run by God God.

Like Project N. Project N was a chat room on Telegram that was created by Bae Moo-Gae and he would essay middle school girls, post the footage into his room. He produced and distributed 76 different pieces of content. He was only given five years in prison. Or there's another case dubbed the second Nth Room case. 10 men, including middle school and high school students, were arrested for distributing CP through Discord.

So not Telegram, but Discord. They originally ran their CP operations on Telegram, but after God God and the doctor were arrested, they moved their operation to Discord. Now, this particular case was really disturbing for South Korea because the quote producers in the operation were minors themselves.

Yeah, see like that said it that the examples yeah, and the consequences are so low for minors in Korea Yeah, and they were selling these videos like full essay videos for $8 $23

And it wasn't just in Korea. November 23rd of 2022, an Australian who is ethnically Korean, Lee Sung Il, was accused of threatening underage girls and creating videos of them to spread on Telegram, just like God God and Park Sa. He operated close to 30 Telegram chat rooms that were very, very similar to the doctor's rooms. Those are just the ones that we know of right now. But who's to say there aren't more? I mean, I don't think that that ended with the doctor or God God.

But that is what we have with the nth rooms and the doctor's rooms. What are your thoughts? Please stay safe and I will see you guys in the next one. Bye.