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25th Apr 2022

WATCH: The trailer for Netflix’s chilling true crime Cyber Hell just dropped

Katy Brennan

*Content warning: This article contains references to sexual abuse*

A must-watch.

Netflix has just released the shocking official trailer for its upcoming true crime documentary Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror.

The film tells the story of South Korea’s Nth Room case – a massive online sexual abuse scandal in which at least 74 young women, including minors, were coerced into recording extremely explicit sexual acts to be sold for profit.

From 2018-2020, a user by the screen name ‘Baksa’ would lure young women in by offering them large payments for photos of their bodies.

After getting their personal information, he would then blackmail them into performing increasingly grotesque sex acts, before sharing the images or videos in his ‘Nth’ chat rooms.

Users would pay anywhere from 250,000 won (€185) to 1.55 million won (€1,150) for the entrance fee to these chatrooms.

Even more disturbing was the sheer number of men involved – approximately 25,000 users across 30 chat rooms.

“This is not one person’s act. The people in that chat room did it together,” a narrator can be heard saying in the trailer.

The ringleader known as Baksa was later revealed to be a 26-year-old man named Cho Ju-bin and he was sentenced to 40 years in prison for his crimes.

The documentary, directed by Choi Jin-seong looks at how two colleges students, a group of journalists, and cyber crime police officers managed to track Ju-bin down. It tells the disturbing story with exclusive interviews, real messages from the chat rooms, animation and re-enactment.

An official synopsis reads: “Anonymous and exploitative, a network of online chat rooms ran rampant with sex crimes. The hunt to take down its operators required guts and tenacity.

“This is the story of one of the most devastating digital crimes that gripped the region, the age of digital anonymity that allowed it to thrive, and the victims who spoke out to help bring it down.”

Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror premieres on Netflix on 16 May.