#266: Viral Video Exposed Korean CEO Running Massive “Revenge Video” Site - The Real Life K-Drama “Taxi Driver”

26:36Like your whole life will be impacted by the color of your hair, which is annoying, yes, but that is literally how it is. There is a different explanation out there on why they all had funky hair. One allegation is that Yang actually would get everyone to dye their hair colors because when you test for drugs in the hair, the hair dye can mess with the test. so maybe that's why he had a company card at the hair salon but either way what a bizarre thing yeah i don't know how he comes up with these tortures and yes that's what i'm saying it's so creative and so sick yeah so sick so sick like if you use that creativity to come up with like a netflix show you would be the next shonda rhimes yeah it would be the next squid game exactly but But instead, he's like, no, I'm going to do it in real life and torture people.

27:24Oh, and of course, at his company, it was raging with sexual harassment. This guy is the epitome of evil. So of course, there's going to be sexual harassment because that is the sad world that we live in. He would force his female employees to sit on his lap while he played explicit videos. He would take pictures of female employees without their consent. And apparently he had files upon files on his computer of his female employees. yeah. He would also write his name on them, their thighs, their inner arms. He would take pictures of his name written on them as some sort of way to degrade and humiliate them in front of their peers.

28:03And this one, I really don't know what to think or how to feel about it, but it would really freak me out. He was really into shamanism. So he would collect and force employees to hand over fingernail clippings, hair, and blood. If he was really upset with you, he would let you know that he performed a ritual and buried a doll with your name and your DNA as he prayed for your inevitable death to be long and painful. Like, imagine you come to work on a Tuesday and your boss sits you down and is like, okay, so this weekend, you know what I did? Yeah, I buried a doll with your name on it because you didn't hand in the project on time.

28:38Yeah, this is absolutely unreal. It's unhinged. It's so unbelievable that someone like this out there exists. Yeah. So Clearly, the work culture here is horrendous. I mean, the worst that I've ever heard. But what does the business even do? With all the drinking and torture, do they even have time to run a full-scale company? How is it possible that this guy is in charge of a company that rakes in tens of millions of dollars in profits a year? How has nobody stood up to him or reported him? What kind of business is this? To understand that, let's talk about a girl named Ashley. And this is a fake name.

29:18Ashley was a woman in South Korea and Ashley had never worked for WeDisc. She actually doesn't know anyone that works for WeDisc. She has no affiliation with WeDisc. By all accounts, Ashley is a normal citizen. She had just gotten married. It's technically supposed to be a very happy time in her life, but it was all being ruined. Okay, so Ashley would go to the store. She would go to the market or the mall and she would notice a few people just staring at her. Not in like a glancing at her, but would kind of stare at her as if they recognized her from somewhere, but they didn't know exactly where.

29:52They couldn't put their finger on it. A lot of men in particular would do this. And she tried to shake it off. You know, it's creepy, but the world is generally still a nice place, right? Then she started getting text messages from old acquaintances that asked her, Hey, are you okay? Do you know? She was like, know about what? And that is when Ashley found herself calling WeDisc's customer service support. An illegal file, an illegal video file of hers was being shared on a internet platform called WeDisc and attracting tens of thousands of views. This video was ruining Ashley's life. Before Ashley had gotten married, she had worked in Japan as a sex worker.

30:34She had no idea that at one of these motels that she was engaging in sex work at had a hidden spy camera in the hotel room. There was footage of her engaging in explicit activities. Her face was right there uncovered. Nothing was censored. And that video that she didn't even know existed from years and years ago, it felt like a lifetime away from today, was being shared on Weedisc and it was haunting her. It was ruining her life. Imagine how utterly violated, disgusted, and gross she felt, not only knowing that this was illegally taken, but now it's being spread like wildfire on this seedy website.

31:14Weedisc is like an adult site or? No. Okay, we're going to get into Weedisc. So she calls Weedisc and the customer service guy is very, very understanding of her situation. He reassures her, I'm going to do everything that I possibly can to try and suppress this video. There's only so much that I can do though. However, if people keep uploading it, it might not be something that I can control. You know, I don't know how many people out there have already downloaded this and have this file in their possession. I mean, that makes sense, right? Okay, well, thank you. I appreciate your trying. She had no idea that right after this man hung up the phone, he turned around in the WeDisc office and said, get this video up.

31:55I'm going to send you the link. We're going to re-upload it over and over. Make new accounts. Upload this video. The same video that he just promised this woman to try and delete, he's telling every single employee in that office to upload it more. What is the reasoning? Because if she had gotten word of this video that means this video is going viral. People like this video and viral videos equals more money for WeDisc. He doesn't care that her life was impacted by it. He doesn't care. It's a hot video that other people want to see and that means money. So everyone is instructed to upload that video over and over again, and if they got more calls asking for it to be taken down, they all lied and sympathetically said, Yes, of course, we're trying our best.

32:43I don't know who all these random accounts are. They probably downloaded the video and they're re-uploading it. Because at WeDisc, the only thing that mattered was, well, keeping CEO Yang happy, but the bottom line. The company was willing to screw over anyone for money, and they mainly stuck to screwing over women. So let's talk about the business of WeDisc. In terms of structure, in terms of just structure, minus all the actual video content, think of WeDisc kind of like YouTube. Like not really, but kind of. So some general principles apply. People, anyone in the world, can create an account, post a video.

33:23And why will they post a video? Because they're incentivized in some way to post. Yes, there's love for creating, for getting publicity. but to make it simple, users get paid when they post videos that are viewed or in WeDisc's situation are downloaded. So people not only post videos, but they post videos that other people will want to download so that they can make money. Other people will join WeDisc and pay membership fees or fees to download videos or bring in ad revenue because there are videos that they want to watch. So literally like YouTube. Some of them might even think, wait a minute, look at these people making so much money off uploading videos.

33:58I should become an uploader too. Now, WeDisc may have the right to push certain videos further, and they might even have their own industry plants. WeDisc employees whose whole jobs were just posting videos pretending to be regular creators. Very interesting, right? But they're on WeDisc's payroll. The main point was to keep viewers entertained so they kept coming. So in essence, WeDisc is a video company slash platform. Now, this is where it gets a bit complicated and it's very crucial because of South Korea's, the legal laws are different. When you sit down on your laptop or computer or open up your Gmail app, all those emails that you open up on Gmail, like your read emails, unread, sent, drafted, all of them are going to be ready for you because you're connected to the internet.

34:46But not all of these emails are stored on your device because that would take up so much space. So these big companies, Gmail, Google, YouTube, Microsoft, TikTok, they have these big servers all over the world. They're like these massive physical like hard drives and they store all the data. And the server's main job is, oh, OK, Stephanie just logged into Gmail. So let's show her all her emails and they'll send the data to my computer. Right. So when you have something in the cloud or not on your device, it's actually not stored in like the cloud. as like stored in a database server, like a big computer somewhere else so you can retrieve it later.

35:23Now, why does this matter in the scheme of WeDisk? Let's say I want to send you a video file. Thinking about the easiest way, I would probably send you a link to my YouTube video or I would upload a video file to a shared Dropbox space. Then you receive the video and then you can download it to your computer if you want. But there is a middleman. I am uploading my video to the YouTube server and it's going to be stored in the YouTube database or the Dropbox database, there's a middleman. And these middlemen go off regulations and rules that are set by different countries and different government entities.

35:55There is something called P2P. This was big back in like the early stages of the internet. Peer to peer. Yes, you can download a video straight out of my computer to yours without a middleman. People might want to do this for a few reasons. And the reasons that matter today are it is the most cost efficient for the tech company because they don't need to buy massive servers that cost, geez, so much money. You don't have to have a middleman telling you, oh, I don't know if you should share this file. The file doesn't go with my rules and regulations, so I'm not going to let you share it. Like if I were to post a video of YouTube of my cat, it'll flag before it ever gets to you to download.

36:36So P2P is a way to not have that censorship. Now, what WeDisc does is say, hey, user 123, thank you for joining WeDisc. You can now upload a video and make money. But in order to do that, you must also give other WeDisc users ability to download directly off your network. So peer-to-peer. WeDisc saves a ton of money and there's less censorship. Now, why is this important? In the early 2000s of the internet world, it was a time of lawlessness, chaos. I'm talking, do you remember LimeWire? Mm-mm. Oh, this is like torrenting. at its peak torrent no copyrighted downloading of movies and music illegal copyrighted downloading yes yes yes yes okay so there were like no internet laws and if there were laws it was very weak laws there were no platforms like netflix or hulu really like if you wanted to watch a movie you would still have to go to blockbuster to rent the movie half of you guys are gonna be like blockbuster it's like a dvd store and if you want to listen to a song, you would have to wait for the buffering on a platform or you would have to download it for like 99 cents a song.

37:47So people started using P2P to download illegally off of each other's computers without getting flagged by a government entity or using an illegal platform to do it. So many people start using WeDisc to download TV shows, music, a lot of copyrighted content. And later on, the primary business of WeDisc was pornographic material. Now, let me tell you why this is important. South Korea is one of the very few countries that outlaws porn. Still to this day, it is illegal to produce and distribute porn. Now, in 2023, it's very easy to access those videos because all you need is a VPN. But back then, half these people had never seen these types of films.

38:31you can't get it at the dvd store you can maybe see an artistic movie that has nudity involved but they can download from we disc yes that's illegal or illegal oh so it's an illegal business yes okay so we disc would allow people to download things off of each other's computer now remember how i told you we just had a bunch of employees pretending to be creators uh-huh because those employees were uploading porn but if they came out and said we disc is uploading porn, it would be illegal. So they would create these accounts pretending to be random South Korean civilians and upload these videos so that WeDisc could step back and say, oh, oh my God, we've been trying our best to take down these videos.

39:14I see. Yeah. That's not even the problem. Okay. That's literally not even the problem. It's crazy. The biggest problem was people on WeDisc did not just want to watch any sort of X-rated video. They had two specific kinds that they liked, both of which were super illegal. Spy cam volca videos, which is hidden camera videos. These criminals will go into motel rooms, love motels, hide cameras in the wall, the outlet, the shower head, the clock on the wall. They will record all the activities by these unconsenting parties and then upload it. Or the second, the biggest category for WeDisc was revenge videos.

39:58Partners, typically boyfriends, who would take videos of their partner either knowingly or not knowingly while they were dating, doing sexual things. Once they broke up, they would put it online. So that was WeDisc's business. And in the beginning, employees would be sent around to restaurants and internet cafes outside of schools, just standing there, passing out these small little paper coupons. And you're about to trash it. But then you read, For one week, you can download movies, music, TV shows, X-rated movies for free. Of course, people are going to get curious. A free seven-day membership.

40:32You're telling me if I missed the episode of The Succession last night at 8 p.m., instead of waiting for a random rerun and basing my whole schedule off of that, I can just go home and rewatch it now? That's good. People would rush home and get on Weedisc's website, But instead of watching succession, they would fall down the rabbit hole of explicit material.

40:57And WeDisc employees knew exactly who they were targeting. They were not targeting girls that were coming out of dorms. They were targeting men of different ages, young men, impressionable men, so many men. And the employees were very, very, very smart. Even their coupon is smart. within seven days these men would be fully addicted to the x-rated material on we disc there does seem to be other added layers of why these people became so addicted again like i said they had probably never even seen porn before up until this point and this part is sick but a lot of men were interviewed and were asked you know why do you watch videos like this you clearly know it's illegal you clearly know that these videos all have a victim, like these hidden camera videos, these revenge videos.

41:44They all have a victim that's very real. You're hurting people. Why do you watch it? And they said, well, the regular X-rated stuff feels a little bit too production-y. All in all, Weedisc was a flourishing company and it made the CEO Yang a very rich man. It is said that he was making about 40 million USD a year calculated for inflation and his net worth was said to be around$200 million. He would also never let you forget it. Like if you ever told him that he was a horrible human being, he would get in your face and say, you can sue me if you want, but I have$200 million and you don't. He actually had the number one P2P website in South Korea at one point.

42:27Weedisc was number one, but he also owned another company called File Nori, which was number three of all P2P websites in Korea. So he's basically like a P2P monopoly. And both these sites, they focused on revenge videos and spy cam videos. That was the moneymaker. To give you perspective, in 2010 alone, around 200 illegal explicit videos were uploaded per hour to these P2P websites. Per hour. Many of it wasn't even uploaded by third parties, which is just as bad. But WeDisc was uploading them. The company itself was uploading them. They would actually go scour the internet for uploaded revenge videos from other parts of the world.

43:12Japan was a big market for them. And side note, before you get on your high horse of like, oh, Asians. America had a version of Weedisc that was taking place. It was called isanyoneup.com. Website dedicated to just posting revenge pictures and videos of women. The website has now since been taken down. But this is not a Korea problem. It's a global problem. So WeDisc would have their employees, not all, but a big selection of their employees, go online and download these illegal revenge videos. Highly illegal in Korea. They go, they download it, and they start posting it on WeDisc for South Korean consumption.

43:50What's crazy is WeDisc is technically a software company. It's a tech company. So what they would do is a lot of these websites in Japan, you cannot download these videos off of or you have to pay a lot of money. In that case, WeDisc had company cards that you could use to pay for that and download it. And if you can't even pay to download it, they created software to record the whole screen and the audio. This is like before it was easily done so that you could re-upload it back to WeDisc. They also had software that was specifically created by WeDisc for WeDisc for making the upload of these videos faster.

44:24One employee would upload more than 1 ,000 videos a day. They said 60 % of that was revenge videos. That is 600 victims a day per employee. The employee said, we used around 500 IDs per employee to make it look like a ton of regular people were uploading these videos. And a lot of the questions were, how do you make 500 IDs though? If you've ever been to Korea, you need a very specific ID number that only you can have. one person only gets one ID and it's government issued to make an account on any social media platform on any of these pages even just food delivery you need that ID number how did you make 500 accounts oh we were granted permission by the administrators of the we discs team I mean we just approve it from the inside technically the people are checking our we disc so so it's like fake account yeah so we just create a bunch of fake accounts and then modify the IP addresses so it looked like it was real IP addresses from all over Korea and not just from our office.

45:32We also had special software to make sure that the video is uploaded quickly and to keep track of all of the different accounts. Now, according to many employees, each employee that was involved in this shady uploading process was able to bring in close to$150 ,000 a month to WeDisc. One employee. So a handful of employees could make a million dollars a month. They're not making it. Weedisc is making it. They would get paid commission on that as well. It definitely was nowhere near a million dollars, but it was definitely incentive for these people to stay. To avoid police detection, because this is super illegal, they used fake accounts, fake IDs, special USBs for computers.

46:13So they would have all these computers in the office, and if you were to sit down and log into one, it would look like your generic library computer, your generic guest computers at the apartment's amenity center. There was nothing on there. it looks like a guest page. You can't really do anything. But the minute that you input the correct USB into the correct USB drive little insert, the whole desktop changes. It is suddenly the screen of a master X-rated material uploader. They would make sure to guard those USBs with their life. All the accounts that they uploaded on were deleted within two weeks, but they were also scrubbed of money.

46:51So it gets complicated, but it's crazy. Let's say an employee at WeDisc uploads a video using a fake username pretending to be a civilian. That video, probably a legal video with a victim, gets downloaded 100 ,000 times. Let's, just for the purpose of making it easy, let's say WeDisc makes$100 from it. So the company takes$100, like how YouTube takes ad revenue. Probably more, but again, just for ease of explanation. They make$100. Now the uploader, the creator, will make$25 from the video. So WeDisc gets$100, you get a$25. Now, the problem is, if you close the account with money still in there, that looks shady.

47:30The government would be like, what kind of idiot would close their YouTube account or their WeDisc account without taking out the money they earned? That is bizarre. So what do they do? Now, if they take out the money and put it into a random bank, that's a paper trail. And you can't open up 500 different banks every day. So the Weedisc employees would create these really stupid purchasing abilities on Weedisc, the platform. They said for the low price of$10, you can make your font yellow and sparkly. For the low purchase price of$5, you can make your video title bubble up and down. No one's really spending money on that because why would anyone spend money on that unless you're a Weedisc employee that has$25 that you need to funnel back into Weedisc somehow.

48:19So you would, okay, bubble font, bright yellow font, heart emoji, let's do the Hello Kitty, and you would spend all the money in this creator's account and then close it down. So it's like money laundering. Yeah, basically money laundering at its finest. Now, for all of this, April 2011, Yang Jin-ho was arrested the first time for uploading copyrighted movies to his platform, not even the revenge videos, not even the spy cam videos. He was rather quickly released from prison and he went back to being, quote, the emperor of the spy cam empire. So from 2011 until 2018, when shit hit the fan again, he was doing atrocious things.

49:04That's a lot of years. That's seven years. In 2018, the video of him slapping his employee surfaces on the Internet, the one that we talked about earlier this episode. And let's go over that whole story. So on WeDisc, there are different places where you can leave posts You don't have to post videos or pictures You can just write a forum, like a little word post Anyone can do this You can make an ID and do it You don't need an ID to do it But there were three IDs that were made that really bothered WeDisc The IDs were 양진호, the CEO's name And 양진호다, which means it's 양진호 And lastly, 진호병신, which means bitch ass 진호 Calling the CEO bitch ass?

49:43Yeah And the IDs would create their own posts just mocking the CEO. There wasn't anything dangerous in the post. It's not like the poster was doxing the CEO or threatening his life. They were just mocking the CEO saying things like, it's me, peasants. I'm Yang Jino. I know you're working hard, but you'll never get paid like this anywhere else. Just making fun of how horrendous WeDisc is. He also took jabs at the former manager, one of the other executives at WeDisc. Again, is it a good thing to do? No. Is it a professional thing to do? No. but is it the end of the world for these people? Absolutely not.

50:16Within a few hours though, the WeDisc team tracks down the IP addresses of these new accounts and gives them to Mr. Yang. He finds out it was an ex-employee of his that used to work as an engineer at WeDisc and Yang was pissed. He messaged him, It's me, Yang Jino. I had fun reading your posts. Listen, I respect that you have different opinions about me and your colleagues and my company but you gotta at least take responsibility for your actions, right? So buckle up, kid, because it's my turn. You're a little fucker that can't even apologize correctly. He texts the former employee, you little fucker that can't even apologize.

50:56The former employee probably just posted this to let off steam. They had no intention of being found out by Mr. Yang. They just wanted to let out their trauma and frustrations. It's honestly kind of, okay, it's not harmless, but you get it. It's not that big of a deal. Yeah, but compared to what the CEO probably did to him or everyone else, like, what are you talking about? Exactly. You're allowed to freaking abuse people. You can't even allow other people to complain. Are you kidding me? And it's not even a thread. It's literally just like a mocking joke, like an elementary style joke. The employee was freaked out, terrified.

51:28He's anonymous to this day, but just think of the power imbalance. So the ex-employee texts him back. I'm sorry, Mr. Yang. I didn't do this with malicious intent. I just visited Weedisc after a long time of staying away from the platform and I randomly had the urge to write what I thought was silly and, you know, it's not appropriate so I deleted it soon after and I'm just very sorry, Mr. Yang. I already saw everything. You don't even know how to say sorry, so I'm going to make you take responsibility for this. I'll take care of you in the way that I always methodically do things. You really forgot my personality, huh?

52:05I mean, it's just threat after threat. Like, what does he mean he's going to force him to take responsibility? What methodical process of taking care of it is he talking about? And also, you really don't know my personality or you forgot my personality. It's to imply that he's going to do something horrible to the ex-employee. So this employee tries to apologize once more over the messages. I'm so sorry, Mr. Yang. You better come over here and get on your knees to beg for forgiveness. I will never do anything like this again. It was so stupid. I will apologize to your colleagues as well or whoever you need me to.

52:39Do you think that I'm asking you to apologize? Like you have a choice? Never mind. I think that you think you have choices in all of this and I guess you're just not listening. So let me be very, very frank with you. You are a person who doesn't want to take responsibility and I will feel more comfortable having no sympathy when i talk to you don't say sorry from now on i'm gonna work on a plan for you so he's threatening yeah yeah i i'm so sorry mr chairman yang please i'm so sorry are you challenging me i said i don't accept your apology and pick up my calls because now i have to get my feelings out fucking coward i'll call you right back sir i'm so sorry i'm at work right now So after work and after all these messages, the ex-employee slash poster visited Yang's company and was assaulted.

53:31The video in question, I mean, yeah, of course, to impersonate and mock someone online is not the right thing to do. But Mr. Yang's reaction, even his messages out of this world, like South Korea is no stranger to workplace harassment. In fact, there's a whole lingo for it. There's a word called kapjil, and it means someone in power that abuses their power and is abusive. We've seen this with like the Korean Air Captain Airis. Koreans said that during quarantine, when they worked from home, things were getting better. And they thought maybe society was progressing to get better. But recently, they all went back to work and they said, it's so bad.

54:06Workplace harassment is making a comeback. Whether it's physical or verbal abuse or sexual harassment, it is just non-stop. So the old companies like Samsung, like these older establishments, you kind of expect it. You expect to be overworked, run to the ground, devastated. But at least you probably get paid more than most people. Now, the newer companies, it's said, they run off of this Western environment. They, you know, like Kakaotalk, Naver, they all tout themselves as like Meta, Google, YouTube. We're the tech world. But recently, they too have had scandals. A lot of people anonymously post about working at Kakaotalk, which is just miserable.

54:49They said it's like a dictatorship. There were multiple employees who died of a heart attack from Naver. And it said that they died of overwork. So, I mean, I'm sure some companies are fine. But even in comparison to that, this video was shocking. It was watched by practically every single Korean citizen. The news organization, Newstapa, that we've talked about with this Haewa Ferry case, Newstapa was able to find the ex-employee and get him to sit down for an anonymous interview. A lot of netizens just had a hard time comprehending. Why did you even go? Why did you go? Like, you know, he's violent.

55:26Why did you go? And he said, well, I have no choice. He is so scary. He said he was going to work on something for me. And knowing him, he loves revenge. He also said he had no idea that this video existed because the assault happened in 2015. He was interviewed after the video was released in 2018. He said recently he found out this video existed. He didn't know. So he didn't know that he had any power against Mr. Yang. He had to move to the countryside in South Korea and develop a completely new lifestyle. He had to leave the tech industry because you know how in America, we have so many big, big metropolitan areas.

56:02So you can have tech startups in New York and SF and LA and Atlanta and Dallas. In Korea, the big companies are all in Seoul and they all work with each other or they all meet in the same meeting areas. They have a lot of not shared spaces, but places that everyone will frequent because they work in this industry. He was so terrified. He could not even be a tech engineer anymore, like a software engineer anymore. He gave up his whole career. It was just terrifying. I mean, he said he tried. He got a couple new jobs at different IT places. And every time he would be drawn into meetings near the WeDisc company office, sometimes in the same building.

56:42Sometimes there would be conferences where the WeDisc team would also show up. He just couldn't do it. He also said he found out that the person who uploaded the video was an ex-employee who was told to film the video. And everyone's like, what do you mean he was told? Apparently, Mr. Yang, the CEO, ordered an employee to take the video of the assault. This is so bizarre. This guy is so cocky and so brazen that he wanted someone to record him being the scum of the earth. He said it is a souvenir. if other employees want to act up or post about him or mock him online he's going to send them this video to show them that's what's going to happen to you then wow this guy was so cocky he felt he was so untouchable that he ordered someone to take this video of him most people would be like don't take a video of me doing this horrendous thing i'm trying to hide this from the world he's like no i'm trying to show the world wow he really thinks he's like the king of korea yeah the ex employee also said, you know, I personally understand the situation.

57:47I think a lot of people online were confused about how there could be so many employees that just sit and watch, but I get it. When you work there, you're not allowed to go up against Yang. You are only allowed to obey him. So because of the company culture, I don't think that anyone could have even stopped him from what he did. So I'm not mad at them. There's even a Korean website called Job Planet. It's a bit like Glassdoor. It's a Yelp for businesses for verified employees to anonymously write about their experience working at these companies. WeDisc is rated 1.8 out of 5, with only 4 % of employees recommending WeDisc to other applicants.

58:24Many employees wrote, if you're willing to do anything for your boss, come here. Yeah. This is basically a porn website management company, a company that's very similar to the army. If you've never been to the army, this is the closest you will get. Other employees talked about how it's nearly impossible to survive in the company if you're a woman or if you don't like smoking, bullying, and drinking every night. Oh, and they stated WeDisc will track your IP addresses when you're off work to micromanage your life to make sure you never betray the company. Many people accused the company of stooping down to any level, willing to do anything.

58:59Many former employees accused WeDisc of corroding Korea's society. They brought up the illegal revenge videos, the spy cam videos that are posted on there, but nothing was being done. Side note, many employees did state that they felt really bad for their hand in the spreading of all these illegal videos. One of them stated, at the time I didn't have guilt, but now I realize what I did was very bad. Maybe I even ruined someone's life. What we did was wrong. Okay, do I think that it absolves them of wrongdoing? No. Okay, it's confusing because in their own right, they are victims of workplace violence and harassment, and I can see how hard that is.

59:38but also many of them stayed with the promise of money even after they realized what kind of videos that they were working on. Now, I don't know what it was. Maybe once you enter WeDisc, you're told if you quit for whatever reason, even if you give a really good excuse, I will make your life miserable. I will find you, hunt you down, and kill your family members. I don't know what they were told. I don't know why they didn't leave, but it is, yeah. There are a lot of victims to this case, so I can't say that I feel the utmost sympathy for these victims versus the ones that were the subjects of the videos.

1:00:11I feel like if the business model was different or if they weren't doing anything illegal or heinous, I would have nothing but sympathy for these employees who are just trying to feed their families, you know? But this feels a bit different, you know? Where do you stand on this topic? I'd love to know your thoughts. But also, the professor in the beginning of this story that was assaulted by the CEO in the room, right? Well, he didn't just move on after being beaten. He was still harassed by Yang nonstop. He was being left threatening calls saying things like, I'm going to give you one month, so go on alive yourself.

1:00:43Yeah, he was egging him on. He would say things like, he would leave voicemails. Are you driving to the school right now? You should drive into the Han River instead. Eventually Yang got bored and moved on. But when those terrifying calls stopped, the professor still had to deal with a cervical spine sprain, multiple fractures, TMJ disorder, headaches, migraines, vertigo, and severe PTSD because of his beating. He had to go to a psychiatrist. He lost his job as a professor. He couldn't even finish the book that he was in the middle of writing. So finally, November 7th of 2018, the emperor of the spy cams was arrested.

1:01:22And here's the frustrating part. Apparently, he knew that the cops were going to raid Weedisc three days before they did. How? Ex-employees allege that Yang had bribed a ton of the high officials, including prosecutors in Seoul. They stated that one time a prosecutor straight up came into the meeting with them and coached them on what to say. Imagine a prosecutor comes in and is like, hey, I'm about to arrest the shit out of you guys. So here's what I think you should say so that we can go easy on you. That is insane. They had three full days. Can you imagine how much footage evidence was destroyed in three days?

1:01:56See, this is the thing. And this happens everywhere in the U.S. as well. The police won't do anything until they are forced by the public. Until the public is, hey, either it's that guy's head on a stick or we're going to put your head on a stick. You pick. Then the police are like, well, don't take my head. Let's go after him. You're right. And you're like, are you serious right now? wow so that video went viral and it was all the backlash that caused the prosecutors to have to investigate we disc because it was leading into who even is the ceo and then to wait what even is we disc and then people being like oh you don't know we disc all they do is post revenge videos yeah so he was arrested for charges related to assault harassment abuse drugs he hired the best attorney money could buy, he admitted to the things that he was caught on video doing.

1:02:52So the chickens and the slapping of the employee, but he gave very thought out excuses to all of that. He's like, well, he was just very passionate man. You know, I'm just protecting my other coworkers from my ex employee. Meanwhile, he denied anything that didn't have concrete evidence attached to it. And he also apologized, but it was very verbatim. He said, I know I did wrong, so I'm sorry. I don't know who he's apologizing to. It doesn't seem like he ever addressed or apologized to the victims of the revenge videos or the spy cam videos. The biggest victims in this case. He was sentenced to seven years in prison, which he immediately appealed.

1:03:33And in his second trial in 2020, the judge lowered his sentence from seven years to five years. He was forced to pay a$20 ,000 fine. He did have multiple trials, though. One of them was for the harassment. One of them was for the illegal uploading of videos. That one, he was sentenced to five years. All in all, with his appeals, he was sentenced to a whopping total of 12 years in prison. And all I have to say is, and this is a sentiment that is shared with a lot of people in South Korea against spy cam and revenge videos. I don't think that this is going to teach him a lesson. No. And society teaches women to feel ashamed when a man does something wrong against them, but they never teach that man to respect women.

1:04:16I don't think 12 years and a$20 fine basically is going to teach Yang to respect women. The penalty of these crimes should match the trauma that the victims will have to carry for the rest of their lives. In lots of countries, speaking of, women cannot even use the restroom in peace. I saw people commenting to talk about this because we were recently in Korea, But the spy cam videos that we talked about in today in connection with WeDisc, a lot of those videos were indeed motel footage that was illegally taken. But even in public bathrooms and subway stations, nothing is safe anymore for anyone, for women, for children, for men.

1:04:51If you go into a woman's bathroom in Korea, it is very common to see, you know, like if you go to like the older areas, you see some holes in the wall or cracks in the stone. women will stuff those areas those holes with wet tissue or draw over with marker there will be some signs outside of subway station bathrooms that say that this bathroom is being monitored by a team of the police that are dedicated to detecting hidden cameras women can quite literally not even shit in peace male colleagues have been caught in south korea hiding secret cameras in the female colleagues bathrooms. A famous news anchor in South Korea was caught taking upskirt pictures in the subway of girls.

1:05:34A famous news anchor. He was going up the stairs and his whole phone was filled with upskirt shots. There are literal companies now in South Korea that you can hire that will come out to check that given area for hidden cameras. Obviously, that's a luxury for most people that most people cannot afford and would not even be feasible on a day-to-day basis because, okay, fine, you go to a hotel and then what? You just have to hire people to pay a bunch of money to look for cameras? It's crazy. It's primarily right now being used for government activities, but it's insane that there's a market for it.

1:06:07They found waterproof cameras in shower heads, outlets that have hidden cameras, cameras in clothing hangers in changing rooms. And a lot of these are Wi-Fi. So this person installs it. They never have to go back for it. they get the live feed. And these live feeds are being channeled into these platforms, illegal platforms that creepy, disgusting people will pay anywhere in the ballpark of$50 a month to watch all these live streams. Cameras will be hidden in teddy bears, lotion bottles at hotels. It looks like a bottle of lotion and you put lotion in there, but at the bottom, it's a camera and it's part of the design.

1:06:47You would never see it. Screws on the wall, picture frames. You can buy sunglass cameras, hat cameras, like the baseball caps that have a camera, car keys, cameras, water bottles, and these camera feeds get live streamed. And the main target is unfortunately women. And what do the police do? Not much. In 2019, almost half of sexual digital crime cases were dropped by the police in South Korea. To many police officers, not all police, but to many, this is just something that happens because men can't control themselves these police officers basically just accept the fact that some men out there are gross and they expect the rest of the world aka women to just kind of live with the consequences of that so women are told to wear masks into public restrooms because it helps keep your identity hidden in case there is a hidden camera that is posted online of you of you peeing yeah but I do think that times are changing in Korea there have been organized marches of not just women showing up but a lot of men showing up to march with signs that read my life is not your porn enough backlash has gotten the government to create entities that are tasked with ridding public places like hotels, motels, bathrooms of these cameras and a lot more men are standing up to other men online to let them know hey this video is not acceptable which is really great but it doesn't change what's still going on okay so this is from an interview and not me finding revenge videos and watching them but an interview of a guy watching revenge videos he said the comments would read things like sorry to the girl but thanks for uploading this love it they said in revenge videos a lot of the comments would joke actively about how this girl is fucked now like her life is over now and they will still continue to show this video so these people It's so sad because guys are never the victim in this scenario, right?

1:08:49The other guy, even if they see the face, they don't think that guy is fucked. No. They only think the girl is fucked. Yeah, it doesn't even make sense. I think we should start shaming victims of all crime then. Just so maybe people will start being like, okay, yeah, why do we shame victims of sexual crime? Because that's crazy. Like, if you got mugged on the street, should I start shaming you? That's insane. Should I be like, well, your life is fucked now, so. LOL. Thanks for uploading the video. There is a recent case, and this is not just happening in South Korea. There is a recent scandal between reality stars where the boyfriend secretly recorded doing the deed with his other reality star famous girlfriend in their house while they were dating.

1:09:26So these are two stars. They break up. He posts this video to promote his new OF account. He was sent to prison because she found out she didn't know this video was created. She didn't know he was going to upload it. It's a revenge video. there's a whole daily mail article about how the daily mail never a great source but the fact that they dedicated paragraphs to how sad this man was how he was so shaken up that he was being sent to prison and how it's very rough time for him and it's literally what like i have no idea who these people are i have no idea if they're good people in other aspects of their life or if they've done other bad things but none of that matters so he secretly recorded a video and then posted it and posted it and tried to make money out of it and now he's like he was so sad he's like i'm heartbroken my family is oh my god and the daily mail is posting it like he's heartbroken look at him let's give him a couple paragraphs to talk about his feelings so again i don't know if these are horrible people but none of it matters because in this particular case it's a revenge video it's illegal he belongs in prison he was wrong she is a victim of this but some of the comments read the video is pretty decent to be honest another one read he made a mistake and it's gonna cost him dear time people move on stop demonizing him let the first person without sin cast the first stone will people finally be happy if he ends his life in jail so much sympathy for what for what some people just commented she's milking it now he's a vile creature and deserved everything he got but like come on Sorry, but enough already.

1:11:05If this poor girl is as traumatized as she says, why keep bringing it up? Get therapy, move on, and stop trying to get in the papers. Ugh, I can see she's making the most out of this publicity. I was genuinely shocked. I didn't, I really, I mean, it's the Daily Mail, but I did not expect the comments to be like that. And to me, that just reaffirms why revenge videos still exist and why they aren't going away and why they're going to become an even bigger problem. I feel like we just do not value a woman's trauma. And that is where I will leave you with today's case and story. What are your thoughts?

1:11:43What are the most shocking aspects of this case? The company's culture? The actual company's crimes? And do you think Mr. Yang is just going to quietly come out and be a tech guru again? Like, is he just going to wreak more havoc and menace to women and employees everywhere? Oh, yeah. With$200 million? Yeah. I don't think he will stop. Yeah. Please stay safe and I will see you guys on Wednesday for the main episode. Bye.