SEOUL – Tony Kim has been paid to watch porn for the last six years, spending his days staring attentively at graphic videos of naked women and sexual liaisons.

He is part of an anti “revenge porn” force in Seoul tasked with finding private sexual images posted online without permission, and removing them.

The 27-year-old first applied for the role at Santa Cruise out of “curiosity”, he said.

“But I soon started to feel very uncomfortable, having to watch videos like this all day long, day in and day out.

“Now I’m used to this and feel nothing,” he added. “It is just a job now.”

The bleak business is part of the so-called “digital laundry” industry thriving in South Korea – a tech-savvy nation but one whose culture remains chauvinistic and where objectifying women is common.

CEO Kim Ho Jin set up Santa Cruise in 2008, initially specialising in removing malicious online rumours or inaccurate information for local firms and celebrities.

But in recent years a new type of client has emerged – women whose private sex videos and photographs were posted online without permission by disgruntled ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands, or malicious acquaintances.

“We monitor various porn, P2P (peer to peer networks) and social media sites around the clock, because such ‘leaked videos’ could pop up at any time and over and over for years,” said chief executive Kim.

‘FUN GAME’

So-called “revenge porn” is a global phenomenon – one study showed that two per cent of Americans who use the internet have had such images posted – prompting social media giants such as Facebook to deploy counter measures.

In South Korea, 7,325 requests to have intimate videos removed from the internet were made in 2016, according to government figures, a sevenfold increase in four years.

This includes hidden camera footage posted by people using surveillance gadgets or smartphones to film women in changing rooms or public toilets.

Seoul recently announced a sweeping policy package to battle the online sex crimes, including a plan to make a prison term the minimum sentence for such crimes.

Some posters photoshop portraits of a female acquaintance onto pornographic pictures to spread the images online.

Santa Cruise boss Kim explained: “Most offenders are teenage boys or men in their 20s who want to see pretty, popular girls out of their reach being abused and humiliated online.” One victim, whose name was withheld, said she quit her job and cut all contact with friends and family after her video emerged online.

“I was once a happy person who lived a normal life like everyone else,” she said in text messages shared by the Korea Cyber Sexual Violence Response Centre. “Now I’m scared of just going outside and scared of the whole world.”

A sense of shame runs deep in the conservative, patriarchal nation, where women who appear in the videos face social stigma, said Seo Lang, head of the campaign group.

Seo said the police cyber-crime unit is understaffed and overwhelmed, with the police often blaming the victims – almost always women – for not having “behaved properly”.

She insisted: “The price to pay for destroying a woman’s life is so light here.”

‘IS THAT YOU?’

At present only six per cent of convicted uploaders are sentenced to prison, according to a study by the Korea Women Lawyers Association, with around 65 per cent being fined.

The anonymous victim said the man who posted their intimate video online was only fined 1 million won (S$1,219), with a website that displayed it ordered to pay a 3 million won penalty.

“These websites scoff at the fine and never change, because they earn enormous profits every month by advertising and spreading videos of women like me,” she said.

Many videos are also used as online adverts for prostitution – illegal in South Korea – said Jang Woo Sung, a senior superintendent in the police’s cyber bureau.

Around 140 women sign up for Santa Cruise’s services each month, according to Kim.

Some have found footage of themselves – often via a male acquaintance sending them a link asking “Is that you?” – while others are simply concerned that such images may have been shared.

Once Santa Cruise finds a video, the firm contacts the website operator – sometimes a gambling or social media site rather than a pornography sharing hub – to have it taken down, warning of violation of privacy laws.

Many comply quickly, but if they do not, or are unreachable, Santa Cruise asks Seoul’s internet regulator to block access to the content, which can take weeks.

“No matter how many times we take it down, it’s nearly impossible to delete such videos completely from the internet,” he said.

The service costs two million won a month – almost two-thirds of the country’s average wage – prices that Kim defends on cost grounds, saying the monitoring effort goes on around the clock.

But he fears the worst if clients running out of funds drop out of contact.

“When I’ve called them, sometimes their parents answered the phone, saying their daughter is dead.”

The National Narcotics Agency’s (BNN) Central Java office thwarted on Thursday an attempt to send 10.68 kilograms of marijuana placed in 20 packages of ground coffee through state postal service Pos Indonesia.

BNN received a tip regarding the delivery and deployed a team to Imam Barjo post office in Semarang, Central Java, where officers apprehend two men who picked up the packages, which had been sent from Takengon in Aceh to an unknown person in Semarang.

The two men, identified as Suriyanto and Saddam Husen, claimed they had been ordered to retrieve the packages by Agus Santoso, who is serving a prison sentence at Porong Penitentiary in Sidoarjo, East Java, for drug trafficking.

“It was sent by someone named Irwandi for Rosinda in Central Semarang. However, the postal courier could not find [Rosinda] at the given address,” BNN Central Java head Brig. Gen. Tri Agus Heru said on Thursday.

A preliminary investigation found that the marijuana was to be sent further to Bali.

The BNN Central Java office continues to investigate the case and plans to coordinate with Porong Penitentiary to interview Agus.

TOKYO: The news that a young reporter at Japan’s public broadcaster had worked herself to death came as little surprise to those inside the country’s media, where a culture of excessively long hours has become the norm.

“I thought it would happen eventually because we work like crazy… like a slave,” said a journalist at one of Japan’s major newspapers.

“I really thought I would die,” she told AFP on condition of anonymity, recalling her days chasing after the prime minister and lawmakers in Tokyo, when she would routinely come home from work at 1:00 am and wake up four hours later.

While journalists tend to work long hours in many countries, the situation in Japan is among the most extreme, with reporters expected to be on the job 24-7.

Even on a snowy night, she used to wait hours outside the house of a politician she was covering.

“I had disposable hand warmers everywhere on my body but it was still too cold. I couldn’t go to the bathroom. It’s bad for your health,” she said, adding that she’s seen fellow journalists becoming physically and mentally ill.

And forget the weekend, she added, as political reporters chase lawmakers back to their constituencies on Friday night.

‘LIKE A ZOMBIE’

A former Tokyo TV reporter pointed the finger at the Japanese culture of “fighting spirit,” in which you’re told to never give up no matter what.

The 32-year-old, who was no stranger to working around the clock, remembers the day she kept going even though she felt seriously ill.

“I didn’t have time even to check my body temperature. Later I realised I had a 39-degree fever,” she said.

“Bosses would say you shouldn’t be lazy but they wouldn’t say you should get rest because you’re working too hard.”

“Then you become like a zombie… this has to stop.”

The case of NHK reporter Miwa Sado, who died of heart failure aged 31 after logging 159 hours of overtime in the month before she died, made global headlines but was far from an isolated tragedy.

Every year in Japan, long working hours are blamed for dozens of deaths due to strokes, heart attacks and suicides.

Death from overwork even has its own word in Japanese — “karoshi”.

According to a government report released last week, there were 191 “karoshi” cases in the year ending March 2017.

The report also showed that 7.7 per cent of employees in Japan regularly log more than 20 hours of overtime a week.

NHK journalist Sado, who had been covering Tokyo assembly elections and an upper-house vote for the national parliament, was found dead in her bed in July 2013, reportedly clutching her mobile phone.

She died three days after the upper-house election.

A government inquest a year after her death ruled that it was linked to excessive overtime. She had taken two days off in the month before she died.

‘KAROSHI’

NHK eventually made the case public four years later, bowing to pressure from Sado’s parents to take action to prevent a recurrence.

It was especially embarrassing for NHK, which has itself taken aim at Japan’s long-hours culture.

“I was shocked that someone at NHK, which has been campaigning against Japan’s long working culture, died from overwork,” said Shigeru Wakita, emeritus professor at Ryukoku University and an expert on labour law.

“Mass media should be able to change the habit of long working hours but they just don’t,” he told AFP.

NHK boss Ryoichi Ueda went to the house of Sado’s parents to deliver a personal apology and vowed reform of the broadcaster’s working practices.

The firm has pledged to reduce hours spent at work, introduce health standards and hold seminars to address the “karoshi” problem.

The case also attracted the wrath of the government, with Labour Minister Katsunobu Kato urging Japan’s public broadcaster to reduce long working hours “so that such incidents will never happen”.

The government itself has tried to clamp down on “karoshi”, naming-and-shaming more than 300 companies in its first nationwide employer blacklist released in May.

In April, a government panel unveiled its first-ever plan to limit overtime — with a 100-hour-a-month cap, which sparked anger among critics and family members who lost their loved ones due to overwork.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has wrestled with the problem and introduced so-called “Premium Fridays”, where employees are urged to knock off work early on the last Friday of the month.

Abe himself spent a Friday afternoon meditating in a bid to lead the way but critics slammed the plan, saying it was not compulsory with most firms simply ignoring it.

Wakita charged that the government is not being “serious enough” to tackle the issue.

“They’re going easy on major companies,” he said.

Read also: One in five Japan employers faces worker’s ‘death from overwork’: Report

A Pathum Thani policeman who refused to respond to a plaintiff’s call for help in a domestic disturbance case because it was raining at the time, will be punished with a 15-day detention to begin on Friday.

Khlong Luang superintendent Pol Colonel Ritthinan Puipanwong on Thursday told reporters that the officer, Pol Sr Sgt-Major Anan Orsuwan had confessed to refusing to aid victims.

Ritthinan said he had already ordered for Anan to be detained for 15 days as punishment.

A fact-finding committee has been set up to probe the case, Ritthinan added.

The move followed criticism of police on Thai social media after a complainant’s Facebook post recounted his call to police earlier this week on the 191 hotline to report that an elderly relative had made a threat involving a knife against his family.

When the call was directed to a Khlong Luang precinct policeman, the plaintiff’s request for aid was turned down because the policeman said it was raining, said the Facebook post.

The plaintiff then made a second call, this time recording the conversation. Met with the same excuse, he offered to give a ride to the officer to arrest the relative.

The knife-wielding suspect in that separate case was nabbed and is facing prosecution.