South Korea will seek to criminalise the act of setting up a website that distributes illegal sexual images, and to give investigators the power to break into such sites to gather evidence and delete the material held on them, under a plan announced in Seoul on Thursday.
The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, the Broadcasting and Media Communications Commission and the National Police Agency published the “integrated response plan for illegal sites” at the Government Complex in Jongno, central Seoul. Minister Won Min-kyung presented it alongside Shin Young-gyu, director-general of the commission’s broadcasting and telecommunications user policy bureau, and Yoo Jae-sung, acting commissioner general of the police, according to Hanguk NGO Sinmun.
The premise is that removing material has stopped working. “As long as there is a structure through which sexual exploitation material is distributed, digital sex crime repeats,” a ministry official told MBC, “so we have set the direction of neutralising the illegal sites.”
The numbers behind it
Digital sex crime in South Korea fell for three years and then turned. Hanguk NGO Sinmun, citing the ministry, reported 4,439 cases in 2021, 3,201 in 2022 and 2,314 in 2023, before a rise to 3,579 in 2024 and 4,273 in 2025.
Refusals have risen alongside. The share of deletion requests from the Central Digital Sex Crime Victim Support Centre that went unmet climbed from 24.4 per cent in 2022 to 28.5 per cent in 2025, the same report said.
Opening a site as an offence
The Ministry of Justice intends to amend the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Punishment of Sexual Crimes so that a person who opens an illegal site can be punished as a principal rather than as an accessory.
Hanguk NGO Sinmun reported the analogy the government is using: criminal law already punishes not only the person who gambles but the person who opens the gambling house.
“Lawful hacking”
The plan would introduce what the government calls an active defence system, and what Korean coverage has uniformly rendered as “lawful hacking” — investigators connecting directly to an illegal site to collect evidence and delete the original data held there.
Hanguk NGO Sinmun reported that comparable powers operate in the United Kingdom and Australia. British police and intelligence agencies may carry out equipment interference, the remote access of computers and phones, under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, subject to approval by both a secretary of state and a judicial commissioner. In Australia, data disruption warrants introduced in 2021 allow the federal police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission to modify, add, copy or delete data in order to frustrate serious offences, and are issued by a judge or a nominated tribunal member.
Police would also form special investigation teams of 20 officers at the Seoul, Busan, Gyeonggi Nambu and Jeonnam agencies, working on their own initiative against those running the sites rather than waiting on complaints, and would widen cooperation with foreign bodies including the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Cutting the money
The government intends to legislate a basis for prohibiting advertising on such sites, which Hanguk NGO Sinmun described as their main source of revenue, and to freeze accounts used to run them through the enhanced due diligence provisions of the Act on Reporting and Using Specified Financial Transaction Information.
It also plans to work with the US Federal Trade Commission to sanction platform operators that repeatedly refuse deletion requests, and to create an emergency blocking mechanism allowing the minister to ask telecommunications carriers directly to cut access. Platform operators would be placed under a duty to delete and report child and youth sexual exploitation material when they find it.
The domain problem
The plan addresses directly the tactic that has defeated blocking elsewhere. Hanguk NGO Sinmun reported that sites are reopening under a new domain within one to two hours of being blocked — a practice Korean officials call domain shuttling.
The government will fund research to detect it automatically, and build a system that blocks a new domain without a fresh review where its similarity to the blocked site is high. It also plans to develop means of blocking encrypted traffic, rather than relying on existing decryption methods.
The wider picture
The proposal arrives three days after the Centre for Information Resilience, a UK-based open-source investigations organisation, published findings on nudification bots that reached a similar conclusion by a different route: that the visible service is the cheapest part of the operation to replace, and that referral networks, backup domains, payment routes and upstream providers survive its removal. CIR reported bots carrying serial numbers in their names, which it read as a count of accounts already taken down and replaced.
It is also the fourth Korean government move on this subject in ten days, following a review of the legal framework, an expert meeting on AI deepfake offences and work by the Sentencing Commission on guidelines for digital sex crimes.