Inducing Paid Purchases by Using Part-Timers to Pose as Women... Random Chat App Operators Referred to Prosecution

Police Apply Charges of Fraud and Aiding Prostitution
Illegal Profits Reached 2.7 Billion Won by Deducting Message Points

The operators of a random chat app, who hired chat part-timers to pose as regular female members in order to induce male users to make paid purchases, have been referred to the prosecution.

On July 30, according to Yonhap News, the Crime Prevention and Response Division of the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency announced that it had booked and referred to the prosecution a total of five people without detention. This includes two people, such as a man in his 50s named A, who are executives of a random chat app under suspicion of fraud, as well as three people, including B, also in his 50s, who recruited part-timers.

Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency. Yonhap News Agency

From January 2024 until recently, A and others are accused of operating the chat app and hiring chat part-timers disguised as ordinary women, called "special members" or "chatters," to mislead ordinary users into thinking prostitution was possible so as to induce them to make paid purchases. B and others are accused of posting messages in open chat rooms stating, "There are work-from-home part-time jobs available," recruiting office workers, university students, and high school students, and then instructing them to act as female special members.

They posted announcements stating that members who had been active for a certain period without being reported would be selected as special members, thereby luring users to chat with the special members. When chatting with these special members, users were required to pay a fee of about 100 won per message (by points deduction), and additional content such as photos and videos were sold separately for approximately 3,000 won and 10,000 won respectively. It is estimated that they obtained about 2.7 billion won in illegal profits through these methods. The special member part-timers would lure men seeking prostitution by using suggestive nicknames or posts, and chat as if they would agree to meet in person. However, when concrete discussions about meeting offline, such as agreeing on the time and place, began, they would exit the chatroom.

The police began investigating after receiving a tip-off during an undercover operation in September last year, in which they arrested a prostitution broker and were told about a chat app that induced paid purchases by pretending to be women. After a ten-month investigation, all those implicated, including A, were booked. The police, having determined that prostitution was rampant within the app, and that the operators including A not only failed to take appropriate action but even introduced the irregular special member system, additionally charged them with aiding and abetting prostitution in violation of the Act on Punishing Acts of Prostitution, etc. The Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency stated that this was the first time nationwide that an operator of a chat app has been prosecuted for aiding and abetting prostitution.

This chat app, which began service in 2019, surpassed 1 million cumulative registered users (with an estimated 60,000 daily users) after the introduction of the special member system in 2023, up from about 830,000 in 2023. Over the past seven years (2019-2025), police nationwide have recorded 729 cases of prostitution occurring through this app (668 under the Act on Punishing Acts of Prostitution and 61 under the Act on the Protection of Children and Youth Against Sex Offenses).

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.