Curb deepfake crimes with undercover agents

The police must be able to work undercover to sneak into crime scenes.

A host of female students at Incheon-based Inha University have fallen victim to a sex crime of producing and distributing pornographic content with deepfake tools. The Incheon Metropolitan Police’s cybercrime investigation division arrested two men behind the content distribution through a chatroom in Telegram, which had an estimated 1,200 members. The police have yet to identify the main culprit. Though four victims have been confirmed, there may be more than 20.

The case is similar to the crime exposed in May involving Seoul National University (SNU) graduates who created and shared illicit sexual content involving dozens of female alumni through Telegram. Police are as slow as they were before. They only take action after victims hunted down the suspects on their own. Police shooed the victims away, saying they could not break into Telegram. The fact that the victims tracked them down only suggests a lack of will by the police.

The repeat of such crimes calls for tougher investigation and punishment. The creation of illicit images has become easy with the advance in AI-backed technologies. Distribution can be discreet through overseas-operated messaging platforms like Telegram. The police must be able to work undercover to sneak into crime scenes.

The undercover investigation of sex crimes has not progressed after the police promised to expand the teenage limit to adult crimes since the SNU incident. A revision to the Special Act on Preventing Sex Crimes to allow undercover investigation into digital sex crimes was motioned in July, but it is yet to be reviewed. Undercover and sting operations can deceive citizens, but the side effects can be addressed later. As seen in the latest case, crimes and victims will only proliferate when nothing is done.

Laws also need to toughen up. Punishment should not just go to the producers and distributors, but also to secondary predators and those who watched the illicit content. A suspect caught with the help of the Inha University case’s victim was released after he claimed he simply looked at the uploaded photos. To prevent the arbitrary spread of fake materials, those who simply peeked also should be punished. The Constitutional Court also agreed with punishment provisions on those who downloaded or possessed such materials for violating the Act on Protection of Children and Youth Against Sex Offenses.

Creating and distributing deepfake materials is as grave a crime as producing sexually exploitative items. The victims cannot just feel humiliated but also terrorized. They go through extreme mental sufferings in fear of being seen by someone they know even when they had done no wrong. Apart from police investigations, citizens must check whether or not they too are joining the ever-worsening digital crimes.