I went undercover to a “strategy meeting” of a group of perpetrators of spreading sexual images…
Perpetrators who came to Tansa’s “space”
Just that day, Tansa was also scheduled to open a space on Twitter at 9:30pm. The theme was South Korea’s “N-ban Room Incident,” in which a group of perpetrators, mostly in their teens and 20s, threatened and sexually lynched their victims and sold their photos and videos on a messaging app. 260,000 people viewed and traded, with one man making 300 million yen. When it was discovered in 2020, public outrage erupted, and police arrested 3,757 people. The National Assembly amended six laws to prevent a recurrence.
Tansa aimed to cite the N-ban Room case to explain the similarities between the video-sharing and album-collecting cases that took place in the N-ban Room.
Benzai also spoke about this Tansa space.
He said, “Today at 9:30 p.m., (Tansa) is going to do a space. What we’re going to talk about is a famous Korean digital crime called the N-ban room. In short, it’s like an album collection or a video share (of themselves using).”
Benzaiten said, reassuring himself that he was worried about ending up like the perpetrators of the N-ban case.
The point is that the mother body over there is not the police or anything like that, but a group of journalists. They are journalists. So they don’t want us to run out of material, and I think they might even want to interview us directly.
Benzaiten is also eager to participate in Tansa’s space with a friend named “Erosuke-san” to ask questions. For those who cannot attend, he says he will record a screen recording.
As he declared, Benzaiten and Erosuke joined Tansa’s space. At first, they came against Tansa’s side for previous articles and defended themselves by saying that they were not doing it now. However, when we told them that posting and spreading sexual photos and videos without consent is illegal and that even if they were not doing it now, the statute of limitations had not expired, they retracted their objections.
■The exchange can be viewed here.
Whack-a-Mole.
Immediately after the Tansa-sponsored space ended, Benzai again opened a Twitter space for the group of perpetrators. It’s a sort of reflection session. I listened to this exchange as well.
I can’t really say, because (Tansa) is right.”
I can’t say, because what (Tansa) is saying is right,” he said. People asked me if I was worried about getting arrested or anything like that, but I kept telling them that if they were worried about that, they shouldn’t do it.
Benzaiten deleted his Twitter account a few days later. Erosuke also declared that he would no longer be involved in the spread of the postings.
Some of the Twitter accounts operated by the other perpetrators have also been deleted. A chat group that was instructing people on how to earn money through video sharing and album collections has also been closed.
However, some of them continue to post their messages, but in a way that cannot be seen from the outside. Some set their accounts to private and continue to post to tens of thousands of followers, or direct only users who have paid an “admission fee” to invitation-only chat rooms where they give away sexually explicit products.
New Twitter accounts of new posters are appearing one after another. The damage has not gone away. It’s like whack-a-mole, you can’t beat it, but it keeps coming out.
The perpetrators of the N-ban room incident have been punished more severely than previous sex crimes in Korea. Behind this was public outrage.
In March 2020, after the incident was uncovered, a “public petition” was filed with the presidential office demanding that the identities of the perpetrators be made public and that they be interviewed in front of the press. More than 2 million people supported this petition in just four days. This was the largest number of supporters ever recorded.
I will continue to cover the story thoroughly, but I don’t think that the power of the article alone will change the situation.
I hope readers will voice their anger at the current situation. I hope that you will share the articles with others on social networking sites, and share your own opinions.
This will give us the power to hunt down the perpetrators.
Reporting and writing： Mariko Tsuji
Mariko Tsuji became a member of Waseda Chronicle (now Tansa) while a student at Waseda University, and from June 2019 to June 2022 she also worked as a reporter for Toyo Keizai, writing about child abuse, psychiatry, and the reproductive business, etc. At Tansa, she created a database of pharmaceutical money and reported on the wasteful spending of the Corona Temporary Grant for Local Development. He has also reported on the creation of a pharmaceutical money database and the verification of the wasteful spending of Corona's temporary local development subsidy. He is also the co-author of "Reporto: Gulag Archipelago.
PHOTO： Aflo
