The authorities arrest a young man who devised a diabolical plan and tricked a broadcaster into watching her naked through a mirror

Chinese authorities have arrested a man who gave a woman a mirror with a hidden spy camera for live broadcasting, and encouraged her to use it while she was naked.

The man, surnamed Zhang, from Guangdong Province in southern China, was accused of illegally modifying, selling and using hidden cameras. According to the “scmp” website, Zhang works as a hidden camera expert, runs an online store that sells modified hidden camera devices, and has sold at least 210 similar spy devices so far.

He was discovered when he sent a mirror to a broadcaster named Lee, an acquaintance from his workplace.

Zhang asked Li to keep the mirror plugged in and on for 24 hours a day, claiming to prevent the circuit board from igniting.

Li found this claim strange, but not too disturbing, until Zhang later told her that one of the advantages of the mirror was to use it when she was without clothes, which he called “naked beauty.”

Subsequently, she called me the seller of the product, who advised her to check if there were cameras inside the mirror.

“When I disassembled it, I found that there were four HD pinhole cameras and five 32GB memory cards inside,” Li said in an open letter posted online.

The local police immediately reported her discovery to me. “One of the recordings on the memory card was labeled 2019, so I realized I might not have been the first victim,” she said.

After his arrest, Zhang admitted to placing the camera in the mirror, and admitted that he had also installed a set of hidden cameras at his ex-girlfriend’s home, which were still working.

The story sparked widespread concern in China about the use of hidden cameras.

According to the Chinese legal services platform Lvtu, taking explicit photos can infringe someone’s personal rights, but it is not necessarily a crime in China. However, under criminal laws, anyone using hidden webcams can be prosecuted if they are found to have broken the law.

In 2019, a local court in southwest China sentenced a man to 3½ years in prison, after he installed hidden cameras in a number of hotels and sold the recordings online.

And in 2016, a court in southeastern China’s Anhui Province sentenced a man to five years in prison after he threatened a former employee with pictures of her showering taken with hidden cameras.