Almost a week after a South Korean-based swingers' Website and its owner were hit by police, 26 were booked March 27 on Internet porn-related charges in the beginning of a new crackdown—aimed at desktop and mobile Internet porn alike—by the Seoul Central Prosecutors' Office.
The 26 were charged with distributing images of men and women having sex, and the suspects were reported to have included three Web administrators who ran adult-use sections of three major Korean Net portals, according to the Asian Pacific news agency Chosun Ilbo.
The three administrators face fines of $7,000–$10,000 and a reported 50 adult Internet companies were ordered to turn over material to regional prosecutors for further investigation, the news agency added.
"Prosecutors…have judged that the distribution of lewd materials on the Internet has reached a serious stage," the Chosun Ilbo reported. "The crackdown will target the entirety of the Internet porn market, including famous portal sites, mobile-service companies providing videos to mobile-phone users, adult-product sites and obscene comics and video-service sites."
An unidentified prosecutors' office official told the news agency that sex-related crime in Korea has exploded in the past decade, and that prosecutors saw a definite connection between that rise and "the indiscriminate distribution" of Internet porn. Prosecutors also said Korean adult sites' lax age verification made it too easy for those under 18 to see the material.
The 37-year-old owner of the swingers' site was arrested March 22 on charges of arranging "abnormal" sexual relations between members of the site, Bubu Plus, which was said to have posted more than 1,200 videos and 300 stills from those encounters. But police subsequently said they might be on shaky ground in that case because it involved activity between consenting adults.
