Does Deleting Messages Hurt My Sex Crime Case in Korea?

Short answer. Deleting material in your own case is not the offence of destroying evidence. Article 155 of the Criminal Act is written around evidence relating to another person’s criminal or disciplinary case. That is the legal position, and it is also the least useful thing to know, because the practical damage is severe: deletion is usually recoverable, it is visible as a gap, and it converts an argument about what happened into an argument about why you deleted it. If you ask someone else to delete material, or the case is someone else’s, Article 155 does apply.

What Korean law says

Article 155(1): a person who destroys, conceals, forges or alters evidence relating to another person’s criminal case or disciplinary case, or who uses forged or altered evidence, is liable to imprisonment for up to five years or a fine of up to seven million won.

Article 155(2) applies the same penalty to concealing a witness in another person’s case or causing a witness to abscond. Article 155(3) raises the penalty to up to ten years where the offence is committed with intent to harm the accused, the suspect or the person subject to discipline. Article 155(4) exempts a relative or a family member living together who commits the offence for the person concerned.

Criminal Act, Article 155. Act No. 21450, in force from 13 September 2026.

What usually happens in practice

Devices are imaged and deleted material is frequently recovered. Even where content is unrecoverable, the absence is not invisible: a thread with a hole in it, or a handset reset shortly after a complaint, is itself something the court is entitled to weigh under the free evaluation of evidence. Conduct after the offence is also an express sentencing factor.

There is a second trap. Material people delete because it looks bad is often the material that would have helped them, because it fixes timings and shows the tone of an exchange as a whole. A message read in isolation is usually worse for you than the same message read in sequence.

Asking a friend or partner to delete something on your behalf is the genuinely dangerous version. That is another person acting in relation to your case, and it puts both of you in a worse position than the original allegation did.

What you should do next

Stop deleting. Preserve the device as it is.
Do not ask anyone else to remove anything. That is where Article 155 bites.
Export full threads with timestamps rather than screenshots of single messages.
If you have already deleted something, tell your lawyer before it is discovered by someone else.

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Written and reviewed by Soobin You, Attorney at YUSU Lawfirm. Former prosecutor. Last legal review: 12 September 2026.