Online distribution of 4500 names, phone numbers and addresses
“Concerns about secondary damages"
“The scale of personal information leakage is enormous…Serious crime”
Shincheonji experienced “Forced work dismissal, discrimination and more”
[Cheonji Ilbo = Reporter Won Min-eum] A pastor who illegally disseminated a list of members of Shincheonji Church of Jesus has been sentenced to prison.
According to law enforcement officials, on 9th April Daejeon District Court administered an eight-month prison sentence with two-year probation to the defendant, Pastor Lee, after being found guilty of having disseminated files online that contained the personal information of 4549 Shincheonji Daejeon Church members and distributing them throughout internet cafes in August 2020. The defendant has been sentenced to 360 hours community service.
Pastor Lee stored and kept a full list of nationwide Shincheonji Church members. When Covid-19 spread in February 2020, Pastor Lee's wife initially asked him for a list of Shincheonji Church congregants to check whether there were any in the vicinity, and Pastor Lee thereon edited and distributed a list of about 4,500 Shincheonji members in Daejeon.
The court pointed out that his wife, Mrs. Mo Lee, had uploaded the received file onto a KakaoTalk chatroom group that she shared with her colleagues, and enabled an unspecified number of people to access these private details.
The Ministry of Justice said, "If personal information is leaked, it may cause secondary damage that infringes on the privacy of the target individual, including indiscriminate commercial use or misuse for various crimes such as identity theft or phone fraud. Therefore, the result for the breach of personal information is serious."
The court ruled that the gravity of the damages resulting from the leakage of personal information was severe because the names, addresses and phone numbers of about 4,500 people had all been recorded in the list sent by the defendant.
The Ministry of Justice said, “In cases of personal information leakage, the subject's privacy can be breached and abused for commercial purposes, and through further crimes that include the unauthorised use of names, phone fraud and more. The wrongdoing in exposing one's personal information is serious.”
In this regard, an official from Shincheonji Church of Jesus said, “The damage caused by the leakage of personal information that followed the outbreak of Covid-19 last year is serious." Damages included job dismissal, workplace discrimination and even harassment via mobile text message.
The official stressed, “The list, which includes a resident registration number, is known to have been shared among pastors. Because this was not collected legitimately, storing it is, of itself, a criminal act. It should have been disposed of immediately.”
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