The Dozhd TV channel decided to conduct a large-scale investigation after the scandalous publication of a Muscovite. She noticed hidden cameras in the toilet of the Shokoladnitsa cafe, which attracted a huge public outcry.
The Dozhd TV channel conducted its own investigation, in which it found out who shoots such videos and why. Videos like these, which are filmed with a hidden camera, are widely distributed on the Internet. And the people who watch them have their own name - voyeurs.
These people, mostly men between 35 and 60 years old, get their arousal from peeping on women in the toilet. Specialized websites have been created for them, on which they register (for a fee) under fake names.
According to clinical psychologist Veronica Kashirina, these people have mental disorders and an obsessive need to peep.
Often people in our country live in one-room apartments of five people - they change clothes in front of each other, wash without closing the door, parents have sex, and children sleep nearby - this greatly blurs psychological boundaries, the attitude towards one’s own and others’ intimacy is distorted, which can lie at the basis of both the desire to peep and, conversely, not to protect oneself, to strive to be naked in public.
The video with Polina spread on the Hidden zone website, which specializes in such videos. According to Dozhd, the videos themselves are later made freely available on torrent trackers, and anyone can download them.
One of the pages of the torrent tracker contains five “seasons” of videos filmed in women’s restrooms - from 2011 to 2015. In the “country of production” column Russia is indicated. Each season has an average of 150-200 videos with women of different ages relieving themselves. The last folder - for 2015 - was added in January 2016. Each video is assigned a serial number, and, judging by the number of the last video, there are more than two thousand of them in this “series” alone.
The Shokoladnitsa coffee shop chain has become the main place where such filming takes place. A whole thread with a discussion was found on the website Woman.ru. One of the users said back in 2014 that she discovered a hidden camera in the Shokoladnitsa on Lomonosovsky Prospekt.
And the voyeurs themselves became very worried. On specialized forums, they suggested that they were unlikely to be pleased with videos from the coffee shop chain.
I can tell you one thing with complete confidence: we won’t be seeing fresh videos from the “Chocolate Girl” push anytime soon.
The other “Chocolate Girl” was not burned.
...the sluggish misconception that the employees or administration of the establishment are somehow involved in this will sooner or later be dispelled, but now, in addition to the chicks themselves, the security services, concerned about reputational risks, will also begin to look “under the rim of the toilet.”
Representatives of coffee shops are trying not to develop this topic. General Director of Shokoladnitsa Tamara Shesterina, in a conversation with REN TV, assured that at the initiative of the management, surveillance cameras are not installed in toilets. Representatives did not provide any other comments.
There are [cameras] in the corridors, in the halls and in the work area. I don't know, I haven't heard of this. Share the information with our security service, they will check. We'll check it out.
Now Polina is negotiating cooperation with a lawyer, because she does not want to leave this story unpunished.
I was angry, upset, and this post became a natural outpouring of my emotions. I tend to draw parallels in this case with cases of domestic violence. I’m not the first person this anonymous person wrote to - he was either simply banned, or, having already learned about everything, they were hushed up.
Previously, a Moscow PR specialist turned out to be a victim of Internet scammers: an unfamiliar girl tricked him into stripping on Skype and began to threaten him with sending intimate photographs to friends, demanding money for silence.
Late in the evening of June 12, a VKontakte user with an empty profile and a little-known Russian rapper in her avatar sent Polina Anisimova a photo with her face and asked if it was her. She read the message only in the middle of the night. It was definitely Polina in the photo: her sweatshirt, her birthmark, a mole on her face. But she did not understand when and how the picture was taken. Besides, she didn’t post anything like that on the Internet at all. Wary, Polina showed the message to her boyfriend.
At first they decided that this was some kind of bad joke or a new type of online blackmail, and began to google methods of extortion on VKontakte.
After Polina confirmed that it was really her in the photo, the anonymous person sent her other photos with the words that he had “bad news” for her and she “suffered just like his loved ones.” In the pictures, a girl is peeing against a background of white and brown tiles. Anisimova became even more confused, refusing to believe that it was her.
The anonymous author did not blackmail or threaten Polina, but only warned that she, like many other girls, had become a victim of secret filming.
The footage had a watermark with the words Hidden Zone. By typing the phrase into a search engine, Polina and her boyfriend easily found hundreds of videos on one of the torrent trackers filmed with hidden cameras in toilets. In the preview of one of them, Anisimova recognized herself. There was no doubt: it was her bag, her blue jeans, her buttocks. True, in the screenshot she had long hair, which she cut two years ago.
This is how Polina found out that since at least 2014, there has been a porn video with her participation on the Internet, filmed without her knowledge.
The next day she herself told about everything in Facebook. “If I had kept quiet about this, this story could have become a reason to blackmail me in the future, although I am not guilty of anything here, like thousands of other victims,” she explains.
The story was picked up by the media. What shocked many most of all was that Polina, according to her assumption, was filmed in the toilet of one of the cafes of the popular Shokoladnitsa chain. At least, that’s what her “informant” thinks, who talked with other girls who were caught in similar videos. Some of them wondered when and how they could get into these shots.
According to the anonymous author, he began his investigation after his relative became the “heroine” of one of these videos. Now he is trying to identify those who are filming the videos and notifying victims using Findface technology (allows you to find a person’s VKontakte account using a photo).
So far he has been able to contact less than ten victims - in many videos the faces are either completely invisible or impossible to recognize. He hopes that the statements of these victims to law enforcement agencies will be sufficient for an investigation to begin.
Now Polina Anisimova and four other girls who were victims of hidden filming are negotiating with a lawyer who will represent their interests. “What happened is a violation of our rights. And now we are trying to figure out what to do about it, how to restore our rights,” she says.
The anonymous author also persuades his relative to go to court, but she, a low-ranking official in the administration of her city, according to him, is afraid of losing her job: “Their unspoken policy is that if you are involved in any scandal, even if it is in the role of a victim, you “ will help you “resign.”
The young man does not give his name, explaining that he “doesn’t want to shine, considering what connections those he’s targeting have.”
***
A quick search on the Internet is enough to confirm that secret filming in public toilets in cafes and shopping centers, in gym locker rooms and on beaches has been going on for a long time, and such videos are widely distributed. Consumers of such content are voyeurs - those who experience sexual arousal from spying on other people. A separate type of voyeurism is spying on women in toilets; such people are aroused by everything related to urination.
One of the associates of the anonymous person who helps Polina and other girls identify the attackers, a hacker who infiltrated a closed forum, says that most voyeurs - men from 35 to 60 years old. They exist according to the laws of a secret society - on the sites where they communicate and exchange videos, there are different degrees of access to content, and registering there can be quite difficult. The desire for careful secrecy is evident. They have their legends and their heroes - providers of the best content and the best angles.
Until the latest scandal with the “Chocolate Girl,” voyeurs were a rather invisible community—in Russia, hundreds of women become victims of those who install hidden cameras and sell recordings from them every year, but there have still been no high-profile criminal cases or convictions.
The press service of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Moscow could not recall a single statement from the “heroines” of such videos over the past few months. The police do not consider this a mass phenomenon, noting only isolated cases.
Videos like the one Anisimova discovered are sold on closed voyeur sites with complex access systems and on regular porn resources. Registration on specialized sites can cost hundreds of dollars.
Voyeur forums, depending on the complexity of registration, can be divided into closed and open. There, participants exchange experiences of filming and peeping, share their own videos and finds from the Internet, and give advice on choosing equipment.
Judging by what they write on forums, many video creators use miniature cameras disguised as other objects - the most common ones look like key fobs - car keys. In Russia, the purchase, manufacture and sale of special technical means for obtaining covert information (that is, without warning those people whom you are recording using covert video surveillance equipment) is prohibited. For violation of the relevant article of the Criminal Code (138.1), the maximum penalty is up to four years in prison. The most high-profile case involving it in recent times wasexcitedagainst PARNAS member Natalya Pelevina - they found a pen with a video camera on her.
Keychain camera
The majority of voyeurs themselves believe that they are not doing anything wrong, although they fear for their safety when discussing what might threaten them.
The former deputy director of a defense plant, for example, was not frightened even by exposure - he was discovered after spying on his colleagues for 15 years, but he “could not stop it” and continued to “walk around and look.”
In another thread, he enthusiastically describes the state that overcomes him when he spies: “When I go into the toilet and spy, sometimes even my heart feels bad, such a thrill, emotions are so strong and bright! Toilet views... completely take over my nature.”
For a voyeur to be aroused, it is not necessary to see something intimate; the very fact of invading someone else’s space and the feeling of power over an unsuspecting person may be enough, says clinical psychologist and specialist in working with addictions Veronika Kashirina. To one degree or another, many people like to spy on others, but, according to Kashirina, it is the obsessive need for this that threatens the safety of other people that can be considered a deviation (in the International Classification of Diseases, voyeurism is listed in the column “disorders of sexual preference”).
This is due to the violation of psychological boundaries between people: “Often in our country people live in one-room apartments of five people - they change clothes in front of each other, wash without closing the door, parents have sex, and children sleep next to them - this greatly blurs psychological boundaries, the attitude towards one’s own and other people’s intimacy is distorted, which may underlie both the desire to peep and, conversely, not to protect oneself and the desire to be naked in public,” the psychologist argues.
Such people often have problems with self-esteem, superiority over the victim and support for each other in closed communities help to artificially raise it - and at the same time suppress feelings of guilt, a sense of their own “wrongness” and fear of exposure.
Most of them are not afraid of criminal prosecution. Its prospects are vague, the participant in the discussion encourages the interlocutors: victims are difficult to find, and from the point of view of the law, the content is ordinary pornography. In general, we just need to be careful and not “draw attention to our existence, otherwise the journalists might blow it up,” he writes.
***
A hacker who hacked a voyeur forum and studied its closed sections using stolen accounts said that the first such communities (one of which was called “Petrovka, 38”) appeared back in the nineties, in the era of VHS cameras. The largest one currently existing - voyeurs among themselves call it “House” (short for the original name - “House for Piglets”) - was created 12 years ago by a man known under the nickname Keks.
Screenshot of the page on "Domik"
Membership in the “House” is closed, and participants have different levels of access to sections. Status and access level increase for money or video publication.
“Many veteran voyeurs have long since retired; the forum provides them with an influx of fresh videos at the expense of newcomers seeking to move up in the community hierarchy and gain a higher status, which gives access to closed sections of the forum with more extreme content,” says the hacker.
Large open forums also have closed sections where participants post their “work.” Most of these people, judging by the content of the forums, do not pursue commercial goals, but there are several “operators” who shoot videos for sale to sites specializing in such videos. They advertise their products in the commercial sections of forums. While actively communicating in the community, they give almost no details about themselves, although other users sometimes share stories from their lives.
One of the anonymous associates talked with a former member of “Domik”, who was a sponsor of the site and for this in 2008 received access to its closed sections. According to this person, there are several major producers of paid voyeur videos.
“Outdoors (nudist beaches, sex in the bushes, girls pissing in forest plantations) are rented for sale by Vadukha, and to a lesser extent by Jerki. Zooom specializes in women peeing at wedding venues (and especially brides). Films minors peeing. Fall has been filming for many years now, sitting right in a cesspool in a gas mask and covered with some kind of blanket or raincoat. “The particularly dangerous voyeur Surokspit, who used to be a non-profit author and moderator of Domik, has been operating in Moscow and filming upskirts on escalators for at least nine years,” the source said.
People with such nicknames are often mentioned on forums, and torrent trackers contain thousands of videos supposedly produced by them.
The source named Surokspit, indeed, posts videos on paid sites in which women have their skirts lifted on the escalators of the Moscow metro. The videos were filmed using video recorders or cameras hidden in a bag or attached to an umbrella.
For a long time, a “cameraman” under the nickname Uchebnik specialized in covert filming in public toilets. Until about 2009, he owned a website with paid videos filmed in the toilets of public catering establishments and educational institutions. Uchebnik is a legend among voyeurs. “I’m not a Textbook, I’m just learning,” says, for example, the status of one of the users of the voyeur forum. Forum participants note his “trademark style,” which can be discerned in anonymous videos that appeared after 2009 on the largest specialized sites.
Another way to create content for voyeurs is to infect the victim’s computer with a virus that allows remote access to the webcam.
Such viruses are often developed by voyeurs themselves to attack a narrow circle of victims, so the antivirus does not immediately recognize the threat. In addition, as one of the sources said, there is legal software for remote access that is not blocked by antivirus, it is installed by fraudulent programmers. Videos of an intimate nature received via a webcam are sold on Domik in the relevant commercial sections.
“Webcam surveillance has become a large-scale cyber fraud,” says Internet expert Anton Merkurov, “all you need to do is download a suspicious program that will introduce a virus to your computer.” According to him, the best way to protect against this is to cover the webcam, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg does, for example.
***
Before getting on the pornographic torrent tracker, the video with Polina was sold to the paid site Hidden Zone, as evidenced by the corresponding watermark.
Hidden Zone is one of the largest resources specializing in voyeur content. According to approximate data from SimilarWeb (the site’s statistics are closed), from April to May 2016, more than 90 thousand people visited it.
Many fans of non-standard porn dream of getting to Hidden Zone, but it is difficult due to multi-stage registration and blocking of accounts with stolen passwords. Entire discussion threads on forums are devoted to describing ways to get there. When you try to access Hidden Zone from a Russian IP address, a stub appears indicating that the site is blocked by Roskomnadzor, although it is not on the “black list” on the supervisory agency’s website.
The site is updated daily, with the latest videos allegedly filmed in Russian public toilets added on June 26.
So on one of the torrent trackers in the “Non-traditional porn” section, among thousands of other videos, a video with Polina Anisimova appeared. But it turned out to be just one episode of a “series” that was filmed in public toilets for several years (and may still be filmed).
One of the pages of the torrent tracker contains five “seasons” of videos filmed in women’s restrooms, from 2011 to 2015. In the “country of production” column Russia is indicated. Each season has an average of 150-200 videos with women of different ages relieving themselves. The last folder, for 2015, was added in January 2016. Each video is assigned a serial number, and, judging by the number of the last video, there are more than two thousand of them in this “series” alone.
In the threads under the distributions, forum visitors comment on camera angles and complain about the irregular supply of new videos.
“Even through one such camera in a public place, hundreds of “models” pass through a day, and dozens of material a week,” laments one of the commentators (punctuation is the author’s).
The folder for 2011 contains videos filmed from the cesspool of a street stall, as well as in a toilet decorated with light tiles. In the following “seasons” these places no longer appear. In the same folder there are videos with an interior that is identical to what can be seen in the video frames with Polina Anisimova and at least one other girl found anonymously. According to the second girl, this is the Shokoladnitsa toilet near the Oktyabrskaya metro station.
This toilet appears in hundreds of videos from the rest of the "seasons". One of the cameras was apparently installed in a trash can next to the toilet: in some frames, the lens is partially blocked by a black garbage bag. In another toilet, according to the anonymous author, the camera was disguised as a metal napkin holder on the door, from which the coat hook had been removed. “I don’t understand how, during business hours, an establishment can make holes in the door for screws and replace one piece of furniture with another,” he wrote.
Women's toilet, in the Shokoladnitsa coffee shop near the Oktyabrskaya metro station. Photo: Rain
After Polina’s post was published, users of one of the thematic forums created a separate thread discussing the “leak.” Several comments also mention the coffee chain.
“One thing I can tell you with complete confidence: we won’t be seeing fresh videos from the “Chocolate Girl” push anytime soon,” writes one of the discussion participants. “They didn’t burn the other “Chocolate Girl,” another one answers him.
Another user discusses whether the coffee shop itself may be related to the hidden filming: “...the sluggish misconception that the employees or administration of the establishment are somehow involved in this will sooner or later be dispelled, but now, in addition to the chicks themselves, “ Security Council, concerned about reputational risks, will also begin to look under the rim of the toilet,” he writes (author’s punctuation).
Screenshot from one of the voyeur forums
In addition to the “Shokoladnitsa” on “Oktyabrskaya”, the victims of the hidden shooting, warned by an anonymous person, were able to recognize the chain’s coffee shops on Tverskaya, Lomonosovsky Prospekt and near the Paveletskaya metro station from the video. A geolocation search on Instagram makes it possible to see that two years ago the interior of the Shokoladnitsa toilet on Tverskaya, 19a was the same as in the footage taken by voyeurs in 2012, 2013 and early 2014. Now there is a different interior. The cafe declined to comment.
Toilet in the Shokoladnitsa on Tverskaya 19a, 2016 / Rain
Hidden camera video preview
Screenshot of Instagram page
A user of the website woman.ru wrote about the allegedly discovered hidden camera in the toilet of the Shokoladnitsa on Lomonosovsky Prospekt in 2014. According to her, “the cafe staff behaved rudely, they didn’t even try to apologize” (author’s spelling - Rain). One of the two “Chocolate Girls” located on Lomonosovsky Prospekt said that they had not heard anything about such an incident, the other said that it happened, but in another cafe (it was not possible to clarify which one).
The series was filmed in at least seven different interiors, but all of them were made in the same beige and brown tones. It was not possible to find out from the video where these toilets are located.
Shokoladnitsa itself is extremely reluctant to comment on such cases. Immediately after the scandal with Anisimova, the general director of the chain, Tamara Shesterina, in an interview with the National News Service, promised that the coffee shop security service would check information about hidden cameras. According to her, video recording is carried out only in the corridors and work area, and she has no information about installing hidden cameras in toilets.
Security officer at Shokoladnitsa
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and hidden cameras in the toilet of the Shokoladnitsa coffee shop, and then found out that she was not the only one who suffered from the actions of unknown people who film such videos and publish them online. Company representatives promised to involve the security service in investigating the incident.
On Sunday, June 12, Anisimova received a message from a stranger on VKontakte. He sent her a photo of her face and asked if it was really her in the picture. Polina immediately recognized herself, but did not remember publishing such a photograph anywhere.
The truth turned out to be prosaic and, frankly, much more unpleasant: after making sure that it was really me in the photo, the stranger said that he had “bad news” for me and that “I suffered just like his loved ones.” Without understanding anything yet, I received several screenshots from a “video” where a certain girl, excuse me, pees in a public toilet. There are two cameras filming this case: one opposite the toilet, the other, as they say, under the rim.Polina Anisimova
Then she discovered an archive of a site with similar videos called “Hidden zone”; she recognized herself in the heroine of one of them.
After looking at numerous preview photos (that’s quite a task, I tell you), I discovered that in one of the series of photos it was really me: there was no doubt left at all - it was my bag, my jeans and my ass. One must assume that I am also in the video - in the process - although I had no desire to watch it in its entirety.Polina Anisimova
Continuing her search, she learned that the filming was supposedly taking place in the toilet of one of the coffee shops of the Shokoladnitsa chain. A whole thread was found on the website Woman.ru discussing such filming. One of the users said in 2014 that she discovered a hidden camera in the Shokoladnitsa on Lomonosovsky Prospekt. According to her, “the staff behaved rudely.” “There is a suspicion that the cafe workers themselves installed the video camera, and I violated their plans,” she recalls.
The person who wrote to Anisimova says that one of the victims was his friend and he wants to get the culprit punished.
Later, a stranger engaged in “retribution” in the form of searching for the culprit, as well as notifying all “victims” using Findface, said that one of the girls remembered the place of the “filming” - “Shokoladnitsa” on Oktyabrskaya. He also outlined his assumptions regarding the identity of the author of the videos. What's happening now? Now I am first of all trying to understand the legal side of the matter - at least a violation of privacy is striking, but I will be very grateful for the help of experienced lawyers and friendly media representatives.Polina Anisimova
General Director of Shokoladnitsa Tamara Shesterina, in a conversation with REN TV, assured that at the initiative of the management, surveillance cameras are not installed in toilets.
There are [cameras] in the corridors, in the halls and in the work area. I don't know, I haven't heard of this. Share the information with our security service, they will check. We'll check it out.Tamara Shesterina, general director of the chocolate shop
Previously, a Moscow PR specialist turned out to be a victim of Internet scammers: an unfamiliar girl tricked him into stripping on Skype and began to threaten him with sending intimate photographs to friends, demanding money for silence.
, "Rain"A quick search on the Internet is enough to confirm that secret filming in public toilets in cafes and shopping centers, in gym locker rooms and on beaches has been going on for a long time, and such videos are widely distributed. Consumers of such content are voyeurs - those who experience sexual arousal from spying on other people. A separate type of voyeurism is spying on women in toilets; such people are aroused by everything related to urination.
One of the associates of the anonymous person who helps Polina and other girls identify the attackers, a hacker who penetrated the closed forum, says that the majority of voyeurs are men from 35 to 60 years old. They exist according to the laws of a secret society - on the sites where they communicate and exchange videos, there are different degrees of access to content, and registering there can be quite difficult. The desire for careful secrecy is evident. They have their legends and their heroes - providers of the best content and the best angles.
The press service of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Moscow could not recall a single statement from the “heroines” of such videos over the past few months. The police do not consider this a mass phenomenon, noting only isolated cases.
Videos like the one Anisimova discovered are sold on closed voyeur sites with complex access systems and on regular porn resources. Registration on specialized sites can cost hundreds of dollars.
Voyeur forums, depending on the complexity of registration, can be divided into closed and open. There, participants exchange experiences of filming and peeping, share their own videos and finds from the Internet, and give advice on choosing equipment.
Judging by what they write on forums, many video creators use miniature cameras disguised as other objects - the most common ones look like car key fobs. In Russia, the purchase, manufacture and sale of special technical means for obtaining covert information (that is, without warning those people whom you are recording using covert video surveillance equipment) is prohibited. For violation of the relevant article of the Criminal Code (138.1), the maximum penalty is up to four years in prison. The most high-profile case recently was brought against PARNAS member Natalya Pelevina - they found a pen with a video camera on her.
The majority of voyeurs themselves believe that they are not doing anything wrong - although they fear for their safety, discussing what might threaten them.
In another thread, he enthusiastically describes the state that overcomes him at the sight of women peeing: “When I go into the toilet and spy, sometimes even my heart feels bad, such a thrill, emotions are so strong and bright! Toilet views... completely take over my nature.”
For a voyeur to be aroused, it is not necessary to see something intimate; the very fact of invading someone else’s space and the feeling of power over an unsuspecting person may be enough, says clinical psychologist and specialist in working with addictions Veronika Kashirina. To one degree or another, many people like to spy on others, but, according to Kashirina, it is the obsessive need for this that threatens the safety of other people that can be considered a deviation (in the International Classification of Diseases, voyeurism is listed in the column “disorders of sexual preference”).
This is due to the violation of psychological boundaries between people: “Often in our country people live in one-room apartments of five people - they change clothes in front of each other, wash without closing the door, parents have sex, and children sleep next to them - this greatly blurs psychological boundaries, the attitude towards one’s own and other people’s intimacy is distorted, which may underlie both the desire to peep and, conversely, not to protect oneself and the desire to be naked in public,” the psychologist argues.
Such people often have problems with self-esteem, superiority over the victim and support for each other in closed communities help to artificially raise it - and at the same time suppress feelings of guilt, a sense of their own “wrongness” and fear of exposure.
Most of them are not afraid of criminal prosecution. Its prospects are vague, the discussion participant encourages the interlocutors: victims are difficult to find, and from the point of view of the law, the content is ordinary pornography. In general, we just need to be careful and not “draw attention to our existence, otherwise the journalists might blow it up,” he writes.
