A man who regularly viewed adult content filmed without the participants' consent was shocked and appalled when he watched a video and recognized himself and his girlfriend having sex.
Going by the name 'Eric', the man had become a regular user of various Telegram channels that broadcast videos and livestreams from the inside of people's hotel rooms - sharing people's most intimate moments with thousands of strangers online.
But three weeks after staying in a hotel in Shenzhen, China, with his girlfriend 'Emily' in 2023, he was browsing Telegram when he saw a man and a woman entering a familiar-looking room, and suddenly realised he had gone from consumer to victim.
Eric's story was uncovered as part of an investigation by BBC's Global China Unit, which found a number of tiny spy cams, often as small as a pencil's eraser, covertly filming hundreds of hotel rooms and creating thousands of victims by turning their stays into pornographic videos.
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These voyeuristic non-consensual recordings of random people have been an issue in cities across China for more than a decade, the investigation indicated.
But with social media channels making them available to a larger audience, they are becoming increasingly notorious. This is despite the fact that pornography is entirely illegal in China, but that seems to be of little consequence to the purveyors.
As a result, residents of these cities, mostly female, have taken matters into their own hands. This includes sharing tips on social media to help others find these tiny pinhole cameras and even pitching tents in their suites to evade any cameras.
But this illegal, unethical, and non-consensual invasion of hotel guests' privacy is continuing, despite China's attempt to crack down on the practice by requiring hoteliers to check rooms for these spy cams.
Eric, now in his 30s, has since stopped watching these videos. He says the content stood out to him as being 'raw' and authentic when he began watching it as a teenager.
He told the BBC: "What drew me in is the fact that the people don't know they're being filmed. I think traditional porn feels very staged, very fake."
When he told his girlfriend that they had been recorded having sex during their stay in Shenzhen, she first thought he was joking. Then she saw the video.
Eric had to explain how he had come across the video, on a special Telegram channel. Meanwhile, Emily was concerned that anyone could have seen the publicly available video. The young couple did not talk for weeks afterwards.
Their experience is sadly not unique, with hotel spy cams becoming something of an industry. BBC investigators found one purveyor of the illegal videos, known as AKA, who was charging many consumers a monthly fee of $65 to access the content.
Just one channel promoting this content had 10,000 concurrent members, with voyeurs commenting on the many livestreams of couples having sex and using extreme misogynist language to describe the women whose privacy they're violating.
Topics: China, Adult Industry
William Morgan