Seoul, Nov 16 (IANS) Police have apprehended over 3,000 suspects in connection with online sex crimes over the past year, with nearly half of them in their teens, officials said on Sunday.

The National Police Agency (NPA) has detected 3,411 online sexual abuse cases between November 2024 and October this year, effectively detaining 3,557 people in total. Of them, 221 were formally arrested, reports Yonhap news agency.

By type of crime, crimes involving deepfake technology accounted for 35.2 percent of the total, followed by sexual videos of children or adolescents at 34.3 percent, and illegally filmed materials at 19.4 percent.

Nearly half of all suspects, or 1,761, were in their teens, followed by those in their 20s at 1,228, and people in their 30s and 40s at 468 and 169, respectively.

Over 90 percent of suspects behind deepfake crimes were in their teens or 20s, largely due to their familiarity with using digital tools, according to the NPA.

The number of people apprehended for online sex crimes increased 47.8 percent year-on-year, with the NPA citing a surge of deepfake crimes since the second half of last year and an expanded punishment for crimes involving deepfake technology.

Meanwhile, police was set to invest 9.1 billion won (US$6.2 million) to build a system that can detect deepfakes and misinformation, officials said, as South Korea seeks to better combat a surge in crimes involving images and sounds generated with artificial intelligence (AI).

Under the project set for completion by December 2027, the police plan to develop the system that uses a multimodal algorithm and analyzes noise and sound frequency to detect deepfake videos and AI-generated voices, according to the officials.

The plan also includes using generative AI to track the origin of online echo chambers to respond to and deter fake news and misinformation at an early stage, they said.

—IANS

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