Bamtoki

» see bamtoki.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Bamtoki opened in October 2016 and did one thing very well. It ran automated scrapers against the Korean webtoon platforms, pulled each new paid episode as it was published, and put it on a free site that asked nothing of the reader. No account, no wait, no per-episode coin. Korean publishers had spent a decade teaching readers to buy comics one chapter at a time on their phones, and Bamtoki took that whole catalog and made it free the same morning.

It worked at a scale that is hard to state calmly. By early 2018 the site was taking roughly 35 million visits a month, about 1.16 million people a day, which put it thirteenth among all websites in South Korea. Prosecutors counted 83,347 Korean webtoon episodes posted illegally. The industry's own estimate of the damage was 200 billion won.

The money did not come from readers. From 2017 the site carried banner advertising for illegal gambling operators, which paid 950 million won over the life of the operation. Behind it was a paper company, servers rented in the United States, and an office in an officetel in Incheon fitted out with test machines. One assistant in Korea handled uploads and one in Cambodia ran the shell accounts that kept the payments moving.

~ the record ~

~ the arrest ~

The Busan Metropolitan Police Agency took the operator on 23 May 2018, a 43-year-old programmer surnamed Heo. The site went dark the same day. In August 2018 the Busan District Court gave him two years and six months, ordered forfeiture of 570 million won, and confiscated 310,000 Ripple, which is a sentence that could only have been handed down in that particular decade. The two assistants got six months suspended for two years and 120 hours of community service.

~ what the authors got ~

The platforms went after him in civil court and won a combined three billion won. That is a judgment against a man whose assets the state had already taken, so the number is better read as a statement than as a payment. In January 2021 a separate ruling ordered damages to the individual artists whose work had been lifted, between 1.5 and 6 million won each, roughly the price of a used car split across hundreds of people who had drawn for a living while their episodes appeared somewhere else for free.

In 2018 I was thirty-four and working on computer vision in Ankara. Webtoons were a Korean format I had heard described and had never once read, and the argument here, over who gets paid when a vertical-scrolling comic is sold one episode at a time, was happening in a script I cannot read and a market with rules of its own. What carries over is the number. Thirteenth most visited site in a country of fifty million, built entirely out of other people's work.

~ the balloon ~

From 2019 the name started coming back. Sites with no connection to Heo took the Bamtoki brand or a near variant of it, because the brand was the asset: readers already knew where to type. Korean coverage calls this the balloon effect, meaning you squeeze one end and the air moves rather than leaves. The enforcement worked exactly as designed and the traffic simply relocated.

bamtoki.com today answers, redirects itself in a loop with a token in the query string, and sells nothing but ad impressions to whoever still types it in.

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