Three years after the 30-year-old South Korean woman received a barrage of online fake images that depicted her nude, she is still being treated for trauma. She struggles to talk with men. Using a mobile phone brings back the nightmare.
Many other South Korean women recently have come forward to share similar stories as South Korea grapples with a deluge of non-consensual, explicit deepfake videos and images that have become much more accessible and easier to create.
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Most suspected perpetrators in South Korea are teenage boys. Observers say the boys target female friends, relatives and acquaintances – also mostly minors — as a prank, out of curiosity or misogyny. The attacks raise serious questions about school programs but also threaten to worsen an already troubled divide between men and women.
It was not until last week that parliament revised a law to make watching or possessing deepfake porn content illegal.
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Police say they’ve detained 387 people over alleged deepfake crimes this year, more than 80% of them teenage boys. Separately, the Education Ministry says about 800 students have informed authorities about intimate deepfake content involving them this year.
Experts say the true scale of deepfake porn in the country is far bigger.