While the government has been working to delete and block illegally filmed content to protect victims of digital sex crimes, one overseas illegal harmful site still hosts approximately 210,000 "Korean adult" videos, it has emerged.
According to the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family and other sources on the 26th, of the 34,628 illegal harmful sites identified during the process of supporting victims of digital sex crimes, 6,683 sites can be accessed through various routes within Korea.
Among these, one illegal harmful site accessible even through commercial networks was being operated in four languages: Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese. It had also built a payment system allowing transactions in Korean won in addition to U.S. dollars.
The problem was that Korean victims were being harmed by the distribution of illegally filmed footage and sexual exploitation content. This site, which maintains a separate "Korean adult" bulletin board, hosted around 210,000 videos. This figure exceeds the roughly 140,000 pieces of illegally filmed content and related material that major value-added telecommunications operators and web-hard operators such as Naver, Kakao, Google, and Meta combined deleted and blocked over the course of last year.
This site received multiple requests from the Ministry of Gender Equality to delete the illegally filmed footage and sexual exploitation content, but gave no response.
On the 24th of this month, the Ministry of Gender Equality sent an official notice to Company A ordering it to suspend its hosting service. Should Company A fail to comply with the request to suspend service, the ministry plans to mobilize all available means, including requesting cooperation from foreign authorities or pursuing extradition.
