Joint Campaign Launched to Prevent Youth Drug and Deepfake Crimes

The National Police Agency and SK Telecom (SKT) have joined forces to launch a campaign using the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging service to prevent drug and deepfake crimes targeting youth.

The National Police Agency announced that starting this month, it will send RCS messages together with SKT to prevent juvenile drug crimes and deepfake production crimes targeting juveniles. The campaign aims to raise awareness of the dangers of these crimes and provide information on prevention and response methods.

The ‘Youth Drug Crime Prevention Measures and Response Methods’ message, which has been sent since the 3rd, informs youth of the dangers of drug crimes and contains information that can be referenced in real life, such as key observation points and response methods for parents to prevent their children from using drugs. An RCS message for deepfake crime prevention is also scheduled to be sent to youth and parent customers within this month.

RCS messaging service is a next-generation message service that is more advanced than existing text messages (SMS, MMS). This service can send up to 1,300 Korean characters, surpassing the 40 Korean character limit of existing SMS. Images can also be sent up to 1 MB, surpassing the 300 KB limit of MMS. The ‘Safe Mark’ function displays the real name of the sender, reducing concerns about impersonation of the organization, and allows the use of various multimedia such as card-type images and videos, enhancing the ability to convey information.

Since May of this year, the National Police Agency and SKT have been promoting various campaigns to protect the socially vulnerable, including the fingerprint pre-registration system to prevent missing children, cyberbullying, and gambling crimes. SKT plans to expand the campaign to a total of eight organizations, including the Korean Red Cross, National Park Service, and Save the Children.

The National Police Agency is operating a school violence intensive activity period from the end of August to the end of October in preparation for the new school year, and is carrying out various activities to prevent school violence and juvenile crime centered around school police officers (SPOs). In particular, it plans to conduct special prevention education on addictive crimes such as gambling and drugs, and sexual crimes such as deepfake production, and strengthen public relations for students and parents in cooperation with the Ministry of Education.

Han Chang-hoon, the director of the National Police Agency’s Life Safety and Traffic Bureau, said, “Through our collaboration with SKT, we were able to conduct effective publicity to raise awareness of various risk factors surrounding youth and widely publicize preventive measures,” and added, “We will carry out even more proactive prevention and publicity activities.”