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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we'll take a look at a global issue that's relevant here locally as well and that's taken the tech world by storm. Did you hear that last month French authorities detained Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of Telegram, a Dubai-based messaging app with 900 million users across the world? The arrest took both Durov and tech moguls from other companies by surprise, sparking debates about free speech and whether it's even right to hold CEOs responsible for crimes committed on their apps.

In a series of posts on his platform X, for example, Elon Musk came to the defense of Durov using the hashtag 'FreePavel' on a video of "Durov praising Musk and his pro-free speech outlook during an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year," per Business Insider. Why was Durov detained? What is the free speech taking place on Telegram that resulted in the billionaire's arrest? Well, an investigation conducted by reporters at The Wall Street Journal found "pedophile rings, identity thieves, and drug traffickers using the app as a shop window to sell their wares."

Furthermore, Telegram has caused somewhat of a national crisis in South Korea. Maybe some of our Korean American listeners, you know about this, where countless chat rooms containing photos of everyday women deepfaked into pornographic material have made national headlines again in South Korea. Analysis published by the cybersecurity company Security Hero last year found South Koreans had the most deepfakes created in their likeness, 53% of all deepfake videos reviewed, followed by Americans, 20%.

While we've seen reports of cyberbullying like this in high schools here in the United States, deepfakes of girls in the high school, Telegram has given a broader platform to this kind of harmful material. Let's delve into the broader marketplace for criminals on Telegram as reported by the journal and the societal effects it's had in South Korea as an example. Joining us now is Angus Berwick, reporter with The Wall Street Journal in London, covering financial crime. He co-reported the piece titled How Telegram Became Criminals' Favorite Marketplace. Angus, welcome to WNYC.

Angus Berwick: Hi. Great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: We also have with us Meera Choi, sociology PhD candidate at Yale researching gender politics and heterosexual refusal in South Korea. She's joined us previously to talk about women's issues in the country and is back to cover the impact of Telegram there now as well. Meera, welcome back.

Meera Choi: Hi. Thank you for having me again.

Brian Lehrer: Meera, while Telegram boasts over 900 million users around the world, it's not as commonly used in the United States as it is in other countries; India, Russia, South Korea, so a lot of our listeners may not even be familiar with the name Telegram. Actually, Angus, let me start with you on this. Start us off with a quick explainer for listeners who've never used the app. What exactly is Telegram, and what is the experience like for its users?

Angus Berwick: I think the best way to understand Telegram is it's a sort of combination of a social media platform and a messaging app. You have the ability, like you do on WhatsApp, for instance, to message a single other person, but it also has this functionality to have these enormous groups, up to 200,000 people, which other apps don't offer. It's just very focused on being a very slick and fast user experience. You can conduct sales and purchases directly on the app. It's been extremely popular in various corners of the world.

Brian Lehrer: I just went over some of the things that you reported are happening on Telegram and some of the things in South Korea, but why was the CEO arrested in France? What's the crime allegedly?

Angus Berwick: I would say the other defining feature of Telegram is its CEO and founder, Pavel Durov. He's always been very much a free-speech absolutist. He says that the moderation on Telegram is light touch. They say they've never handed over a single byte of user data to any third party. What this has done is turned it into a hotspot for virtually every criminal group that are looking to exchange and sell illegally obtained material that might be--

Brian Lehrer: Is part of the issue here that there's a lot of encryption on Telegram available to its users so law enforcement can't monitor criminal activity as easily as it could on other social media or messaging apps?

Angus Berwick: Well, it's an interesting question. I would say the bigger issue is the often refusal from Telegram to cooperate and hand over information to authorities because the encryption, this has actually been something that Telegram has been quite effective in them, a lot of researchers say that the encryption offered in Telegram is actually not far below what you would have on WhatsApp or Signal. The default setting is not end-to-end encryption, which is the level of encryption that you have by default on WhatsApp or Signal. In effect, it's actually not as secure and private as people believe it to be.

Brian Lehrer: They're refusing at Telegram central office to cooperate with law enforcement in ways that maybe WhatsApp or Google or Facebook might be accessible to law enforcement investigations, and that's controversial from the other side, that they allow law enforcement to look at things sometimes without a warrant. Telegram goes all the way in the other direction. Am I framing this right?

Angus Berwick: Yes. I think the French said that they sent thousands of requests to Telegram [inaudible 00:06:59] the sale of child sexual abuse material and that these requests were piling up in a Telegram email address without being attended to. Certainly, even though the encryption is lower, it's very much a kind of-- Because of the absence of moderation, a lot of these groups have existed for years, and Telegram has said previously that they won't process requests in relation to these private groups.

There's very much an atmosphere of impunity and the feeling that you can say or transact in whatever and you're unlikely to face any repercussions.

Brian Lehrer: Meera, let me bring you in at this point and say it's not just France that's pursuing legal action against Telegram. Your primary area of research is what you call heterosexual refusal among South Korean women, and I understand that the app has wreaked havoc in South Korea. Can you give a quick overview of the situation and how it connects to your area of expertise?

Meera Choi: Sure. Gender-based violence, and particularly the prevalence of digital sex crimes in Telegram, is really integral to my research on young feminist movement and heterosexual intimacy in South Korea. To give you a quick overview of what's going on now, people refer to it as Korea facing a deepfake pornography emergency on Telegram. It recently fueled public outrage when male students from Korea's most prestigious institution, Seoul National University, SNU, were found creating deepfake pornographic content of their female classmates.

Currently, there are 61 identified victims in this SNU case alone, with 12 of them being SNU students. Among five of the key perpetrators that have been charged and sentenced, one graduate was sentenced to five years in prison for producing around 400 deepfake pornographic videos and distributing 1,800 of them on Telegram between July 2020 and April 2024. Of course, these videos involved many women he knew during his time at the university. Since then, in 2024 alone, 513 cases of deepfake sexual crime cases, instigated mostly through Telegram, are under investigation, and 318 people were arrested.

What is shocking is that out of them, almost 80% of them are minors, and also, 20% are younger than 14 years old. When these incidents happen, many experts and feminist politicians have continuously said that these deepfake pornography and sexual crimes happening on Telegram are not new to South Korean society. They've existed more than five years, beginning with K-pop female idols being one of the first victims worldwide.

In fact, as you mentioned, more than half of the world's deepfake images and videos involve Korean women. There are other cases, such as the Nth Room case that happened in 2019, also involving a series of sexually exploitative videos distributed on Telegram.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we want to invite you in on this, if you can help us report this story. For one thing, have you been targeted in a crime in any way on Telegram? Have you been the target of a deepfake or anyone else? Are you a Telegram user, lawful or not? Help us report this story. Call or text us with your experiences or anyone with questions for our guests on any angle of this issue, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, including what the criminal responsibility should be, if any, of the CEO of the company who's now been arrested in France.

Meera, how did this issue rise to the attention of lawmakers in South Korea? It sounds like this problem of deepfaking and sexually degrading female acquaintances is more widespread in that country than anywhere else, but how did it become a lawmakers issue? I think people would also be curious to hear who is being victimized here and by whom. Who's making these deepfakes? Are there any sectors of society that are particularly vulnerable so we don't just overgeneralize as South Koreans doing this to South Koreans?

Meera Choi: Yes. As I mentioned earlier, following other cases that happened since 2017, the recent case regarding Seoul National University students quickly drew lawmakers’ attention. This is especially due to the fact that the majority of both perpetrators and victims were minors and also that these cases really involved elite men whose identities are really tied to their prestigious universities. That really further amplified public awareness.

After the Seoul National University case, the case expanded to involving 500 schools, including middle schools, high schools, and universities, and of course, teachers and fellow female classmates have been identified as victims. These legal grounds for punishing the creation and distribution of deepfake content were first established in 2020. At that time, the lawmakers added a provision to the Sexual Violence Punishment Act, saying that those who create deepfake videos or similar materials could face up to five years in prison or fines of up to approximately $38,000.

Now, they're proposing a bill to punish people who watch or even own these videos too. Of course, some legal experts and feminists have criticized the lack of will from investigative agencies because they keep saying that they're using the excuse that because of its nature in Telegram that they cannot find the perpetrators and it's hard to punish. In reality, these laws were not really enforced. Also, one of the leading task force in 2020 of this sexual violence act also said that the task force had proposed more than 60 related legal provisions to punish these perpetrators and protect victims, but they were really not accepted.

On your question about who are vulnerable, honestly, I would not say any place is safe from such crimes in Korean society at the very least, given the prevalence of spy cam in public spaces, photos from social media could be used to create these content. Given how many people target women wearing uniforms to create these images and videos, schools, hospitals, any places could be a target of being victimized.

Brian Lehrer: Why do you think this is happening so much more in South Korea than other places? We could say the whole world has a relatively similar problem of sexism and sexualizing women and pornography, so why South Korea?

Meera Choi: That's a really good question. I think one of the biggest reason is the growing toxic masculinity and incel culture in South Korea and given the heteropatriarchy that has been going over for a long time. I know that feminist women and protesters have been really trying to advocate for legal changes to pressure the government and lawmakers regarding this issue, but there has been a lot of cases where they find out that actually, it's not just that these men are deeply involved in these digital media culture and consider this as a form of leisure and play, but then that there are other aspects of South Korea's patriarchal institutions that are involved in it.

One of that being-- and I've been talking with one of the first Korea's political party that involves focus on gender issues called the Women's Party. They've been really highlighting the problematic nature of the large legal markets and industry dominated by major law firms. These firms have been using their expertise and former prosecutors' experience to provide legal services aimed at reducing sentences and helping sex crime offenders evade punishment.

This has been becoming a really large market, and there's a lot of market benefiting from these kinds of sexual crimes. Of course, this Telegram market is a profitable market for a lot of men. There are a lot of growing efforts to tackle larger issues of these political and economic corruption that are closely tied to this deepfaking and violence against women.

Brian Lehrer: Angus from The Wall Street Journal, let me go back to you. For listeners just joining us, we're talking about the messaging app Telegram. Its CEO has been arrested in France in connection with that app allegedly allowing criminal activity to take place, including drug trafficking and these deepfake pornographic videos, largely using the faces of real women and girls, and then adding whatever the user decides to add to those faces.

I see that reporting from the BBC shared that these Telegram chat rooms are sometimes called humiliation rooms or friend-to-friend rooms, and these rooms include some of this kind of content. Angus, after listening to Meera describe Telegram's issue in South Korea with these deepfakes, how does it compare to what you've seen on a broader scale?

Angus Berwick: What she was describing, that's very, very shocking stuff. I would say, what we've looked at is kind of similar. In particular, for our recent reporting, we were looking at some-- in particular, the use of Telegram by fraud organizations based in Europe, which are receiving-- They're selling huge amounts of hacked and leaked private data on Telegram. You can access these groups and these channels, and just every day, it's just a river of information for sale often bundled together. You might pay $100 for a package of 50 passports.

Often, in a similar way to South Korea, the fraudsters, what they're doing is that they're turning these IDs and passports into deepfake images or deepfake videos, and then combined with the ID cards, that can be used to bypass a bank's verification process. You might have a case where a fraud ring is borrowing money in a victim's name or laundering money in a victim's name. It's hard to fathom the complete scale of this.

We reviewed several of these chats in great detail for our reporting. Researchers are tracking thousands more. As I said, this is just one aspect of the criminality. This is the kind of the frauds. There's the sale of the child sexual abuse material, there's the drug trafficking aspects. I think one person we spoke to, a researcher, said that Telegram was ground zero for pretty much every form of criminality in the planet at the moment.

Brian Lehrer: A listener writes in a text message, "Any reporting about Telegram should touch on its contribution to getting information out of the war in Ukraine. Both sides of the conflict have various Telegram channels transmitting frontline footage and info in near real-time. It's been a valuable source of open-source intelligence." Do you agree with that, Angus?

Angus Berwick: Yes, definitely. In the war in Ukraine, you've seen that both sides have been avid users of Telegram. I would say it seems that recently, particularly Ukrainians have been shifting more to Signal given some of the concerns about Telegrams encryption. It's definitely been a boon for researchers as well, including myself.

Telegram, through the app, you're able to access these groups and channels and just see criminal activities taking place pretty much in the open, whereas in the past, as we describe a bit in the piece, a lot of this activity might have been taking place on websites on the darknet, which is quite hard to access for your average internet user. You need special software, and it's quite a clunky experience. Now it's at your fingertips.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener writes, "I think we have to note the life sentence of Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road website, into this conversation." Can you do that in 30 seconds for people unfamiliar?

Angus Berwick: Yes. Well, Ross Ulbricht, who went by the name the Dread Pirate Roberts, was the founder of the Silk Road, which I think was one of the first darknet drug marketplaces where you could, as I said, you download Tor, this software that cloaks your identity, you get on Silk Road and then you are able to buy whatever you want mostly in exchange for crypto. His site was later taken down by the US government, and he remains in jail.

Brian Lehrer: Last question for you, Meera. If Telegram didn't exist because there are other places where you can make deepfake videos, would that problem not exist in South Korea to the extent that it exists today?

Meera Choi: Of course, Telegram provided a platform for these kinds of illegal activities and crimes to thrive, but there are other cases that involve different platforms that are not Telegram that has been continued for more than a decade regarding these illegal exchanges of videos and sexual exploitation. I would say that it's really more entrenched in Korean society and misogyny and structural sexism than it being an issue just related to the platform.

Brian Lehrer: Meera Choi, PhD candidate at Yale researching gender politics and heterosexual refusal in South Korea, and Angus Berwick, reporter at The Wall Street Journal in London, covering financial crime. He co-reported the piece titled How Telegram Became Criminals' Favorite Marketplace. Thank you so much, both of you, for joining us.

Meera Choi: Thank you.

Angus Berwick: Very much.

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