A SOUTH Korean court has sentenced a key member of the "Nth Room" sexual blackmail ring to 34 years in prison for coercing dozens of women and girls into sharing sexually explicit videos of themselves.
A district court in the southeastern city of Andong convicted Moon Hyung-wook, 24, of operating the online chatrooms on Telegram and distributing thousands of obscene videos of female victims.
According to a Yonhap news agency report, Moon, known by his username GodGod, was arrested in May last year and was charged the following month on 12 counts, including the violation of laws on protecting minors from sexual abuse.
Prosecutors had sought a life sentence for him.
The leader of the blackmail ring, Cho Ju-bin, was sentenced to 40 years in prison last November.
The infamous "Nth Room" had lured young women, including minors, with promises of high-paying jobs before forcing them into pornography.
The New York Times said that according to prosecutors, Moon opened one of the first such sites in 2015 and offered more than 3,700 clips.
Moon, an architecture major who was expelled from his college after his arrest last year, was one of the most notorious of the hundreds of people arrested during investigation.
In his ruling, the presiding judge Cho Soon-pyo said Moon had inflicted irreparable damage on his victims through his anti-society crime that undermined human dignity.
During the trial, the court was told on how Moon approached young women looking for high-paying jobs through social media platforms.
He then lured them into making sexually explicit videos, promising big payouts and also hacked into the online accounts of women who uploaded sexually explicit content, pretending to be a police officer investigating pornography.
Prosecutors said that once he got hold of the images and personal data, he used them to blackmail the women, threatening to send the clips to their parents unless the victims supplied more footage.
Last December, police said about 3,500 suspects have been investigated and 245 were arrested over the "Nth Room".
Many of those investigated were men in their 20's and even teenagers.
The police have also identified 1,100 victims.
The NYT report said that South Korean police have started cracking down on sexually explicit file-sharing websites as part of international efforts to fight child pornography.
As smartphones proliferated, much of the illegal trade had migrated to online chat rooms on messaging services.
The police said they had trouble tracking down customers of the online chat rooms because they often used cryptocurrency payments to avoid detection.