Hundreds of Motel Guests Filmed by Peeping Tom Website
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An investigator points at a spy camera hidden in a hair dryer holder at the National Police Agency in Seoul on Wednesday. /Yonhap
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A group of men have been arrested for secretly filming guests at love motels across the country.
The group are accused of installing tiny spy cameras in TV sets, electricity plugs and hair dryer holders in motel rooms since August last year and filming as many as 1,600 motel guests. They live-streamed the footage on a website.
Police said Wednesday that they arrested two men on charges of secretly filming and distributing video footage of motel guests having sex. Another two were booked for assisting them with the website.
The two arrested men, who ran an internet memory storage business together, plotted to film illegal video footage for money and started checking into dozens of motels in cities in Gyeongsang and Chungcheong provinces in August last year where they installed the mini spy cameras.
They then opened the peeping-Tom website in November and attracted 4,099 members in just three months. Non-paying customers were given access to sample clips, while paying customers got access to the live streams.
Ninety-seven customers bit and forked out around W7 million (US$1=W1,130). But one Internet user reported the website to police in December, and police arrested the two men in early March and shut down the website.
Police said that some 800 videos were filmed in the motels over the last seven months. "We have not detected any instances of the footage being distributed beyond the website", a police spokesman said. But it is quite likely that users downloaded the footage and distributed it. None of the victims appear to have complained to police so far.
Jung Seok-hwa of the National Police Agency said, "The cameras could be spotted if all of the lights were turned off in the room and a phone torch was shone on suspicious areas of the room, where it was reflected in the camera lenses and gave away their locations", but otherwise they were practically invisible.