A man in his 30s who hacked into school faculty accounts in the Busan area for five years to steal personal photos and videos, creating and storing fake sexual materials known as deepfake pornography, has been sentenced to prison.

The Busan District Court sentenced the man, identified as A, to three years in prison yesterday (August 21) after he was indicted and detained on nine charges, including violations of the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection, etc., and the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Punishment, etc. of Sexual Crimes.

In addition, the court ordered him to complete a 40-hour sexual violence treatment program and imposed a 10-year employment restriction at institutions related to children, adolescents, and people with disabilities.

A, who worked as an employee for an IT equipment management company, was accused of stealing approximately 220,000 personal photos and videos from the PCs of 194 faculty members at schools in the Busan area from July 2021 to September of last year.

A took advantage of moments when faculty members who requested PC maintenance stepped away from their desks, accessing logged-in cloud accounts such as Google Photos and NAVER MYBOX to save photo and video files onto a USB drive. He was brought to trial on charges of subsequently using these files to produce 20 deepfake videos.

Furthermore, it was found that A illegally filmed the body parts of faculty members 45 times inside schools, and also downloaded and stored child and adolescent sexual exploitation materials as well as illegally filmed content from adult websites.

The total number of videos stored by A, including deepfakes, reached about 500, with the total volume of problematic data amounting to 405 gigabytes.

The court stated, "The nature of the crime is very grave as the defendant committed offenses targeting an unspecified number of women, as well as teachers and students at the schools where he worked," adding, "The victims are likely to have suffered extreme mental distress."

However, the court explained the reasoning behind the sentencing by noting that he admitted to all the crimes and is a first-time offender with no prior criminal record.

Reported by Kim Taewon | Video by Na Hong-hee | Graphics by Lee Jung-ju | Produced by SBS Digital News