BBC uncovers China hotel spy-cam porn network (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: A BBC Eye investigation in China has uncovered a network of cameras hidden in hotel rooms that are secretly filming people. Reports of so-called spy cam pornography, where people are filmed without their consent, have been on the rise in China, as Wen Qingjiang from the BBC's World Service reports.

[00:00:21] Speaker 2: This is the moment the BBC locates a hidden camera used to live stream unsuspecting hotel guests. It belongs to a criminal network operating on Telegram. I have been monitoring it from London for months. You can see the camera. It's so tiny. Here it's connected to a chip. Secret recordings of intimate moments in hotel rooms are increasingly being sold on the internet across China. Emily and her boyfriend Eric stayed in a hotel for a Christmas getaway. They later learned that a recording of their stay had been posted online.

[00:01:05] Speaker 3: I eventually watched for a few seconds, but I didn't finish watching the whole video. I found it hard to accept.

[00:01:14] Speaker 2: BBC Eye has been investigating one of the individuals selling access to a website live streaming spy cam porn. They are known online as AKA. We found that over a seven-month period, this website hosted streams from 54 hidden hotel cameras, meaning thousands of victims could have been secretly filmed. AKA's VIP group also offers thousands of edited videos, with the earliest dating back to 2017. The impact on victims is life-changing. Emily and Eric now live in fear of being recognized.

[00:01:54] Speaker 3: I think for us even now, the psychological tension is still lingering.

[00:02:01] Speaker 4: I always feel that people are photographing me, recording me.

[00:02:05] Speaker 2: But Eric is not just a victim of secret filming. He discovered their video while browsing the content himself. We want to know why he watched spy cam porn.

[00:02:17] Speaker 4: I think traditional porn feels very staged, very fake. But secretly filmed videos feel raw, realistic, completely real to me.

[00:02:27] Speaker 2: He says that knowing now what it feels like to be filmed without consent, he feels humiliated and ashamed. Eric only managed to take down the channel that was hosting his video after flagging it to the telegram moderators as child abuse, a tactic to get their attention. Social violence organizations in the region say telegram routinely fails to respond when spy cam porn is flagged.

[00:02:53] Speaker 5: Our takedown rate has been decreasing year after year. And one of the huge challenges is to report contents. Their policies shape how the content would be spread.

[00:03:05] Speaker 2: We took our findings to telegram. In a statement, they said, sharing non-consensual pornography is explicitly forbidden by telegram's terms of service. Telegram proactively moderates and accepts reports in order to remove millions of pieces of harmful content each day. We confronted the agent, AKA, with our findings, but he did not respond. AKA's non-telegram feeds have since been deleted, but the website he promoted remains active. Wanqing Zhang, BBC News.

[00:03:39] Speaker 1: And you can watch the full BBC documentary on the BBC iPlayer here in the UK, or the BBC World Service YouTube channel. Just search for Exposed China's Spy Cam Porn.