South Korea: The deepfake crisis engulfing hundreds of schools

Last Saturday, a Telegram message popped up on Heejin’s phone from an anonymous sender. “Your pictures and personal information have been leaked. Let’s discuss.”

As the university student entered the chatroom to read the message, she received a photo of herself taken a few years ago while she was still at school. It was followed by a second image using the same photo, only this one was sexually explicit, and fake.

Terrified, Heejin, which is not her real name, did not respond, but the images kept coming. In all of them, her face had been attached to a body engaged in a sex act, using sophisticated deepfake technology.

Deepfakes, the majority of which combine a real person’s face with a fake, sexually explicit body, are increasingly being generated using artificial intelligence.

“I was petrified, I felt so alone,” Heejin told the BBC.

But she was not alone.

Two days earlier, South Korean journalist Ko Narin had published what would turn into the biggest scoop of her career. It had recently emerged that police were investigating deepfake porn rings at two of the county’s major universities, and Ms Ko was convinced there must be more.

She started searching social media and uncovered dozens of chat groups on the messaging app Telegram where users were sharing photos of women they knew and using AI software to convert them into fake pornographic images within seconds.

“Every minute people were uploading photos of girls they knew and asking them to be turned into deepfakes,” Ms Ko told us.

Ms Ko discovered these groups were not just targeting university students. There were rooms dedicated to specific high schools and even middle schools. If a lot of content was created using images of a particular student, she might even be given her own room. Broadly labelled “humiliation rooms” or “friend of friend rooms”, they often come with strict entry terms.

Ms Ko’s report in the Hankyoreh newspaper has shocked South Korea. On Monday, police announced they were considering opening an investigation into Telegram, following the lead of authorities in France, who recently charged Telegram’s Russian founder for crimes relating to the app. The government has vowed to bring in stricter punishments for those involved, and the president has called for young men to be better educated.

The BBC has reached out to Telegram for comment and while it is yet to reply on this particular case, it has previously told the BBC that it proactively searches for illegal activity, including child sexual abuse, on its site. It said undisclosed action was taken against 45,000 groups worldwide, in August alone.