Karma is a Bitch – Imagine Logging Into To Your Favorite Illegal Chinese Spy Porn Website to See Yourself Having Sex With Your Girlfriend

Garett Mizunaka. Unsplash Images.

BBC – One night in 2023, Eric was scrolling on a social media channel he regularly browsed for porn. Seconds into a video, he froze.

He realised the couple he was watching - entering the room, setting down their bags, and later, having sex - was himself and his girlfriend. Three weeks earlier, they had spent the night in a hotel in Shenzhen, southern China, unaware that they were not alone.

Eric (not his real name), from Hong Kong, began watching secretly filmed videos as a teenager, attracted by how "raw" the footage was.

"What drew me in is the fact that the people don't know they're being filmed," says Eric, now in his 30s. "I think traditional porn feels very staged, very fake."

But he experienced what it feels like to be at the opposite end of the supply chain when he found the video of himself and his girlfriend "Emily" - and he no longer finds gratification in this content.

When he broke the news to Emily that their hotel stay had been filmed, edited into an hour-long clip, and uploaded to Telegram, she thought he was joking. But then she saw the footage for herself and was mortified.

Aw, shucks. I'd feel bad for you "Eric", but what goes around comes around. This man spent years and years getting his rocks off to secretly (and illegally) filmed Chinese spy porn. Then one day, he hops on Telegram (which according to BBC is the Mecca for watching people who thought they were alone have sex with each other) to see his bare ass and mediocre penis having average sex with his girlfriend in a Shenzhen hotel. 

I find it pretty funny how pseudonym Eric just volunteered up, "I've been beating it to illegal hotel spy sex my whole life. I LOVE watching unsuspecting strangers who don't know they're being filmed fuck each other. I think it's super neat. But not anymore now that I'm a victim."

I know his identity is protected, but he still could have said he accidentally stumbled upon the video. Or that somebody sent it to him. Or he could have claimed he thought these spy videos were "staged", and that the people on camera were in on it. Not that anybody would have believed him. But he didn't have to make a point to make it clear that he's been watching illegal Chinese spy porn since he was a teenager. 

The article says him and his girlfriend didn't talk to each other for weeks after they discovered the video.

Emily was terrified the clip could have been seen by colleagues and family. The couple didn't talk to each other for weeks.

Are you sure she wasn't talking to you because she was mortified about the video? Or was she coming to terms with the fact that you're kind of a pervert, Eric?

I'd love to visit China someday. But after reading this article, I've come to learn that if I ever do so, I'm apparently going to have to purchase a "hidden camera detector". Because the BBC is making it sound like when you get a hotel room in China, there's a 50/50 shot you're going to wind up on Telegram.

But the threat of being secretly filmed in the privacy of a hotel room has not gone away. The BBC World Service has found thousands of recent spy-cam videos filmed in hotel rooms and sold as porn, on multiple sites.

Much of the material is advertised on the messaging and social media app Telegram. Over 18 months, I discovered six different websites and apps promoted on Telegram. Between them these claimed to operate more than 180 hotel-room spy-cams which were not just capturing, but livestreaming, hotel guests' activities.

I monitored one of these websites regularly for seven months and found content captured by 54 different cameras, with about half operational at any one time.

That means thousands of guests could have been filmed over that period, the BBC estimates, based on typical occupancy rates. Most are unlikely to know they have been captured on camera.

A hidden-camera detector, widely sold online as a "must-have" for hotel guests, gave no warning they were being spied on.

Thanks for the tip, BBC. Even when I'm traveling within the United States, I'll guess I'll be checking the vents in my hotel for cameras moving forward. Although unless you do something really embarrassing… if you end up on one of these websites, and the video of you does well… to find out you had 10,000 concurrents watching you have sex could be a nice little ego boost.

On Telegram - banned in China but commonly used for illicit activity - AKA advertised these livestreams. One Telegram channel had as many as 10,000 members during the course of our investigation.

"Damn do I really fuck that well? Do people think my girlfriend is that hot? Time to create that OnlyFans honey. We're gonna retire young."

Karma is a bitch, Eric. Nobody is going to shed a tear when the Chinese spy porn industry's #1 customer gets a taste of his own medicine.