Man illegally recorded, sold videos of sex acts with women he met on Tinder
The 23-year-old was sentenced to 24 weeks’ jail after he pleaded guilty to five charges including insulting a woman's modesty, selling obscene videos and criminal intimidation.
File photo of the State Courts in Singapore. (Photo: CNA/Calvin Oh)
Lydia Lam
13 Sep 2022 01:25PM (Updated: 13 Sep 2022 01:25PM)
SINGAPORE: A man engaged in sexual activities with at least 20 women he met on dating application Tinder, recording and photographing some of them without their consent.
He illegally sold some of the images and videos of the sex acts, resulting in the footage being circulated online.
Chan Xin Kai, 23, was sentenced to 24 weeks' jail on Monday (Sep 12) for his crimes. He pleaded guilty to five charges including insulting a woman's modesty, selling obscene videos and criminal intimidation. Another six charges were considered in sentencing.
The court heard that Chan was between 18 and 20 at the time of the crimes. He joined Tinder in 2016 or 2017 and befriended various women on the application.
He engaged in sexual activities with at least 20 of them and also did the same with other women he met in school, the prosecutor said.
Chan often recorded or photographed the sex acts, sometimes without the consent of the women.
One of the victims got to know Chan on Tinder in early 2018, when she was 18 and he was 19. They "engaged in a sexual relationship", court documents said, before breaking off contact in late 2018.
However, in February 2019, the victim received a screenshot from an unknown person on Instagram asking if she was the person depicted in the screenshot. The photo showed the victim performing a sex act.
The victim lodged a police report over the incident, and found out from a friend that nude videos and pictures of her were circulating online.
The victim confronted Chan, but he denied circulating the images. He claimed that he had deleted them and lost his phone.
Investigations revealed otherwise: Chan had taken a total of 56 videos and 112 photos of the victim while they were engaging in sex acts.
He decided to earn some cash by selling these videos and photos in November 2018, and picked her as he felt he was not as close to her as his other partners.
Chan created fake profiles on dating and chat apps posing as the victim and offered to sell her photos and videos. He managed to sell two obscene videos of the victim to two unknown individuals, earning S$160.
He also earned another S$240 selling videos and photos of other victims performing private acts.
Another victim was 20 when she met Chan on Tinder. She engaged in sex acts with him regularly for five months.
Chan took 36 photos and 20 videos of this victim performing intimate acts without her consent.
On May 15, 2019, Chan threatened this victim by sending her a message on Telegram. He said: "Yea I have your nudes btw so u may want to reply me."
At the time of this message, the victim had stopped meeting Chan and no longer wanted to do so. However, Chan wanted to meet her for sex and threatened to circulate her nude photos in order to get her to meet him.
Feeling threatened and afraid that Chan would circulate the photos of her, the victim met Chan. He assured her that he had deleted the images but did not actually do so.
"SERIOUS OFFENCE"
The prosecutor asked for 24 to 31 weeks' jail and objected to the calling of a probation suitability report.She noted the harm and seriousness of Chan's offences, saying that he had intruded upon the privacy of multiple victims and sold obscene videos of this intrusion to others.
"Filming victims in their private moments is a serious offence which warranted the updating of the Penal Code in 2019," noted the prosecutor.
A Penal Code Review Committee observed that there was a need to provide for the specific offence of voyeurism to address the serious problems that technology had created, remarking further that there was a "bustling market" online for upskirt videos and photos, said the prosecutor.
She added that many of the videos in this case involved a high degree of intrusion where the victim was identifiable. Additionally, Chan was between 18 and 20 years old at the time of the offences and was not particularly young.
The prosecutor pointed out Chan's long period of offending and the difficulty of detection - if the first victim had not been informed that her videos were being circulated, the accused might not have been caught for his actions of recording multiple victims.
