Full Overview

What is the Nth Room?



Nth Room refers to a mass digital sex abuse scandal that's happening in South Korea using a messenger app, Telegram. Telegram is known for its cyber security and encoding of all contents, rendering it untraceable. A man who went by the username Baksa (which means "doctor"), now thought to be 25 year old Jo Joo Bin/Cho Joo Bin, referred to from now on as Cho, facilitated a lucrative business of selling videos of sexual abuse through Telegram. Please note that while Cho is the person currently accused of running the rooms, this is still an ongoing investigation



He created different closed chat rooms in various tiers: 1st room, 2nd room, 3rd room ... Nth room, where the name comes from. Users would pay an increasingly high amount of money to gain access to a "tier" room. For example, users who paid ₩100,000 (~$80 USD) to Baksa would gain access to the lowest tier room with the "least" abusive videos, and those who paid ₩1,500,000 (~$1,200 USD) would gain access to in the highest tier room with access to the "most" abusive videos.



TW: pedophilia

76 female victims have been identified, 16 of which were minors (the youngest being 9 years old). The primary targets were teenagers. Over 260,000 men are said to have paid for these videos, including famous entertainers/artists, sport stars, and CEOs from popular establishments.

How were the victims affected?



TW: exploitation, blackmail (next 2 paragraphs)

To obtain these videos, people who worked for Cho (called "operators") would find girls and women on the internet and steal their personal information, such as personal identification numbers or private photos, that would then be used to threaten and blackmail the women into doing what the operators asked. Some victims from low-income backgrounds were also lured in with promises of money.



Initial orders included taking videos of themselves undressing and masturbating, which would then be sent back to the operators and distributed amongst the "lower-tier" Nth rooms. They would then be used as a way to continue threatening and blackmailing the women into doing increasingly worse requests, which would be distributed amongst the "higher-tier" rooms.



‼️TRIGGER WARNING‼️

This next paragraph mentions very disturbing/violent sexual assault and attempted murder

The more abusive requests included acts such as carving the word "slave" onto their bodies with a knife, putting a pair of scissors in their vagina, cutting off their nipples, and eating feces. Some men even paid to rape or gang-rape the women themselves. It has also been revealed that Cho plotted the murder of a young girl at the request of a paid member, meant to be an act of revenge against the girl's father. Thankfully, the member was arrested before the attempt was carried out.

Why is this a big deal?



Aside from the obvious, this is a big deal because in Naver's realtime search (South Korea's biggest search engine), "how to quit Telegram" was on the top 5 trending search terms for teens and people in their 20s. A huge number of people would have to be searching that in order for it to be on the nation's biggest search engine's trending words. The issue itself is mainly discussed on social media platforms and hasn't received that much attention from the mainstream media yet (note: this thread was written March 20th).



Online mom cafes (internet communities for moms) show mothers searching for what to do in case their daughters were abused, whereas on dad cafes fathers are asking questions about how to deregister from Telegram. So many questions asking "how to quit Telegram without leaving any record" and "is it illegal to have been a member of an Nth room" are popping up all over the internet.



TW: victim blaming, mention of mental health

This is still not being taken very serioiusly by South Korean authorities, and some journalists trying to cover the story have been blackmailed. Some men have been horrifyingly blaming the victims themselves, while some victims have stated that they're currently struggling with mental health issues after what happened to them.

Important Updates

TW: pedophilia, sexual abuse

China is currently investigating their country's version of the Nth Room. The websites, now inaccessible, are said to have videos such as “four-year-old girl”, “beautiful young girl”, and “high school student”. It is possible that there were over 8.6 million people who accessed these sites (source 1, source 2).



This is a breaking story, so updates will be added once released.

TW: pedophilia, sexual abuse

A 16 year old who is said to have ran a series of chatrooms similar to the Nth Rooms has been arrested. It's said that he used to work for Cho, but after a falling out he created his own series of rooms called Pacific Expedition that distributed videos of sexually explicit content involving children and teenagers. The room had anywhere between 8,000 and 20,000 users.

TW: mention of Goo Hara

There has been outrage from the Korean public after it was revealed that the judge handling the 16 year olds' case is Judge Oh Duk Shik. The judge has previously been under fire for ordering that Goo Hara's sex cam, which was filmed without her consent, needed to be shown in the courtoom during the trial of Goo Hara's ex-boyfriend Choi Jong Bum.

Further updates can be found here.

The ringleader Jo Joo Bin/Cho Joo Bin



Watch him being a whiny bitch here