A court on Wednesday sentenced a deepfake crime suspect to five years in prison after finding him guilty of producing about 400 fabricated pornographic videos and distributing about 1,700 such videos online.

The Seoul Central District Court handed out the sentence to the 28-year-old suspect, surnamed Park, saying his victims’ sexual humiliation was beyond description.

Park was indicted in May this year on charges of creating the 400-odd deepfake videos and distributing as many as 1,700 such videos online between July 2020 and April this year.

“The content of the fake videos (by Park) is disgusting and can hardly be described. He used it as a tool to relieve stress without feeling any shame,” the court said, lamenting that ordinary people’s everyday action of posting personal records on social media has been exploited.

Park is also accused of participating in the deepfake porn crimes allegedly committed by graduates of Seoul National University (SNU) against dozens of their female alumni. In the SNU deepf
ake case, four SNU graduates have been indicted for producing and distributing fabricated porno photos and materials by compositing photos of dozens of women, including SNU alumni, onto Telegram.

Deepfakes refer to doctored photos, videos or audio taken from content on social media or other means without people’s consent, often created in a sexually explicit way and distributed online.

Earlier this week, President Yoon Suk Yeol ordered his government to sternly respond to the recent proliferation of digital sex crimes using the deepfake technology.

Source: Yonhap News Agency