Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cyber Hell: Exposing An Internet Horror’ on Netflix, A Doc About Doxxing And A Case Of Online Exploitation In South Korea

Cyber Hell: Exposing An Internet Horror (Netflix) explores the effort by a an ad-hoc group of print, television, and student journalists, cyber crimes police, and anonymous hackers to locate and capture the chat room operators who extracted and sold exploitative content from their victims using phishing and other online harassment techniques. The unchecked growth of internet anonymity is weaponized here, with victims left to wonder if safety is just an illusion.  

CYBER HELL: EXPOSING AN INTERNET HORROR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “Dozens of victims, including minors, were blackmailed into filming sexual videos and posting them on Telegram…” the story was scandalous when it broke wide in the South Korean media in early 2020. The operators of chatrooms in the Telegram app had forcibly coerced victims into sharing explicit content, then sold the material to thousands of users, who paid them in cryptocurrency. Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror tracks backward to where the “Nth Room” case began, through the splatter of online chatter, the frightening simplicity of a “phishing” data attack, and the ugly face of anonymous exploitation to a whistleblower’s email. Kim Wan, a journalist at South Korean newspaper The Hankyoreh, describes how the email led him to track a Telegram user called “Baksa,” who was sharing explicit content he had forced his “slaves” to post. But when he published his article, Kim was immediately doxxed himself. Baksa and another user, “god god,” were insulated, protected by a wall of internet anonymity, and their relentless attacks continued.

Once users’ photos, videos, identification and location information had been phished, Baksa and god god would escalate their threats and sexual harassment. Victims “were told to perform grotesque, bizarre acts,” Kim Wan says, “and everyone in the chat room watched them together.” The Hankyoreh formed an investigative reporting task force, joined by a group of student journalists known as Team Flame, and together they gleaned what identifying factors they could from the online residue of Baksa and god god. Police cyber investigators were also brought in, and some headway was made. But the main perpetrators remained active, insulated, and brazen. As the South Korean newsmagazine Spotlight prepared to air the story, Baksa sent a message. “A woman will either throw herself off the roof of the SBS Building or set herself on fire if you broadcast anything about me.”

With more research into the victims’ identities, and a painstaking investigation of the chat room activity, police were able to prevent any loss of life, and began to close in on Baksa and god god. But their operation involved so much more than just Telegram. Similarities to classic phone scams burble to the surface, and the unregulated world of cryptocurrency exchanges become integral to their capture. And a group of hackers who remain anonymous themselves band together with the police to finally put a handle on Baksa’s back, and achieve some kind of justice for the many victims of online sexual exploitation.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Netflix also features The Raincoat Killer: Chasing a Predator in Korea, a docuseries about South Korean authorities’ search for an elusive serial killer. And in the 2021 true crime doc Why Did You Kill Me?, a grieving mother constructs a bogus MySpace page to phish for and ultimately nab the man who murdered her daughter.

Performance Worth Watching: Cyber Hell’s visual representation of the online, social media landscape where the Nth Room crimes took place is a striking mix of the familiar and the unsettling. Text boxes and speaking prompts, app icons glimmering from iphone screens, and a throng of links, .jpgs, avatars, and web addresses transform into grimly animated reenactments of the world inside the chat rooms, and the queasy prodding of a stranger’s inbox invasion.

Memorable Dialogue: Bul, one of the student journalist “outreachers” from Team Flame, says that if she could go back, she’d work harder and even earlier to expose Baksa and god god. “To be honest, I have lots of regrets about that,” she says. “The Nth Rooms were like the gates of Hell. It had always existed but we had been ignoring it all this time. But since that gate is now open, society at large has to face this issue. Things are changing for the better, but I don’t think we’ve changed enough.”

Sex and Skin: Cyber Hell doesn’t further exploit the Nth Room victims with the inclusion of anything explicit. But the sexual violence they experienced is a pervading theme of the doc, which concludes with contact information for any viewers who are victims of sexual harrasment and and who seek information and support.

Our Take: “It was as if I was fighting the illusory world that Baksa was in, not Baksa himself,” Kim Wan says. “And it was a lonely fight.” The journalist’s comment gets at the disquiet that pervades Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror. It’s the sense – the certainty, even – that the digital harassment orchestrated by people like Baksa is just an errant click away from any of our social media-addled, online shared lives. It only emphasizes what we probably knew already, which is that we take the security of our online selves for granted, and it’s really just a flimsy membrane laced up with our mother’s maiden name of what we called our first pet. But a theft of our identities or finances is bad enough. What’s even more unseemly about the Nth Room case is its illustration of how insatiable the anonymous online demand for gruesome prurience can be. The “corrupt sexual ethics” of Baksa himself are one thing. But that he cultivated such a willing audience for the exploitative content he stole speaks to the larger social indictment Cyber Hell highlights.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror explores the startling power of anonymity in the age of social media, how it can enable and insulate some truly terrible behavior, and leave the victims of digital exploitation to wonder how they’ll ever feel safe.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges