Operators of a random chat application who hired part-time workers posing as female members to induce male users to make paid purchases have been handed over to prosecutors.
The Crime Prevention and Response Division of the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency said on the 30th that it referred without detention a total of five people to prosecutors, including two people such as A, in their 50s, who have operated the app on suspicion of fraud and aiding and abetting prostitution, and three people such as B, in their 50s, who recruited the part-timers.
From Jan. 2024 to recently, they operated the chat app and hired large numbers of female part-time workers known as "chatters." They are accused of dressing them up to look like real, ordinary female members who could engage in prostitution, luring male users and getting them to spend money.
Recruiters including B posted ads in open internet chat rooms saying there was a work-from-home part-time job that could be done at home, then drew in not only office workers but also college and high school students, and instructed them to chat while pretending to be special female members.
To avoid users' suspicion, the operators lured men by issuing a false notice claiming that members who had no issues in their activity were designated as special members.
They set it up so that each time a male user exchanged messages with these fake female members, 100 won worth of points would be deducted per message, and to view photos or videos, users had to pay an additional 3,000 won and 10,000 won, respectively. Investigators found that the illicit gains they pocketed through these irregular tactics amounted to 2.7 billion won.
Part-time workers hired as special members posted provocative screen names or messages to attract men seeking sexual conversations, then deceived them as if they would meet in person and set a time and place. However, once the conversation began to turn to concrete arrangements to meet offline, they immediately exited the chat room.
The case began when police, in the course of secretly arresting a prostitution broker in Sept. last year, obtained a tip that there was a chat-room app where people pretended to be women and extorted money. After roughly 10 months of persistent investigation, police arrested all of the operators. In particular, judicial authorities additionally applied charges of violating the Act on the Punishment of Acts of Arranging Sexual Prostitution to the operators, finding that they not only left frequent sexual transactions in the app unchecked but also encouraged them by introducing the irregular special-member system.
The app, which first opened in 2019, saw its membership explode after introducing this irregular system, with cumulative members jumping from about 830,000 to surpass 1 million recently, and daily users reaching 60,000. In fact, over the seven years from 2019 to 2025, police nationwide uncovered a total of 729 cases of prostitution through this app.