A Berlin court convicted a fourth member of an online predator ring on Wednesday, extending a German investigation that has exposed how a network of mainly Chinese men used Telegram group chats to coordinate the drugging and sexual assault of women, and disguised their crimes with a vocabulary designed to evade detection.
Zhiting S., a 32-year-old trained medic, was found guilty of being an accessory to rape and three counts of sexual coercion. He was sentenced to five years in prison. His defense attorney, Ehssan Khazaeli, said his client "has admitted being part of a chat group but did not offer any significant advice." The defense plans to appeal.
The conviction is the latest chapter in a sprawling case that has drawn comparisons to France's Gisèle Pelicot affair and triggered an international law-enforcement response spanning Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. At its center sits a messaging platform that claims compliance with European Union rules, and a network that operated in plain sight for years before anyone intervened.
Court documents described a chilling internal lexicon. Members of the network referred to women as "cars," sedatives as "fuel," and rape as "driving." They called their victims "dead pigs." The group styled itself the "German driving school for experts," the Associated Press reported.
The coded language was not casual slang. It was a system, a way to discuss the incapacitation and sexual assault of women while minimizing the risk that automated content filters or outside observers would flag the conversations. Members posted photos and videos of attacks on unconscious victims inside the chats. They swapped tips on how to carry out assaults.
Authorities investigated roughly two dozen Telegram group chats connected to the network. Some of those chats, according to victim's attorney Magdalena Gebhard, had up to 50,000 members. An inner circle of eight perpetrators allegedly drove the operation. Some of the German-language chats dated back to at least 2020, court documents showed.
For four years, the network apparently operated without meaningful platform intervention.
German police first became aware of the network in 2024, after the alleged ringleader, Dapeng Z., changed his methods. Prosecutors said he shifted from drugging and sexually abusing female acquaintances to targeting strangers he met online, a tactical escalation that drew law-enforcement attention.
Dapeng Z. was arrested in 2024 in a joint operation between German and Chinese law enforcement. The Chinese consulate in Frankfurt confirmed the cooperation. Beijing News, a state-run Chinese outlet, identified him as the group's ringleader.
A Frankfurt court sentenced Dapeng Z. to 14 years in prison for aggravated rape, attempted murder, and other offenses. He has appealed. Frankfurt chief prosecutor Dominik Mies offered a blunt assessment of the network's character, as the Washington Times reported:
"The perpetrators were characterized by a particular ruthlessness, an objectification of the victims, and the perfidious planning of their crimes."
Three inner-circle members had already been convicted before Zhiting S.'s sentencing on July 8, 2026. In the Berlin case, prosecutors established that Zhiting S. had pointed to a particular sedative in the chats before an assault carried out by Dapeng Z. Video recordings found by investigators also led to three additional sexual coercion charges tied to alleged abuse of Zhiting S.'s partner in China.
The pattern of tech platforms failing to detect or report predatory behavior on their services has drawn increasing scrutiny from lawmakers. In the United States, Senator Grassley has launched a probe into major tech companies over their failure to report child sexual exploitation, a parallel reminder that platform negligence is not confined to any single app or country.
The German investigation has metastasized into a broader international effort. Europol, the European Union's police agency, recently announced "Project Medusa," an operation designed to dismantle online networks that promote drug-facilitated sexual assaults. Led by law enforcement from Germany and the U.K., the operation has already produced 57 arrests.
Dutch police arrested four men suspected of drugging and sexually abusing women after receiving information from German and British authorities. The alleged perpetrators used social media chat groups to share videos and discuss how to drug victims.
German investigators also contacted Los Angeles police about a potential suspect, a graduate student from China accused of drugging and sexually assaulting three women. The defendant allegedly procured drugs from a Chinese national in Germany, a detail that suggests the network's supply chain extended across continents.
Judge Markus Koppenleitner, who presided over a related hearing in Munich, framed the scope of the problem in terms that echoed the Pelicot case:
"Pelicot is not an isolated case. This is not a Chinese or French phenomenon, but one that also exists in Germany and, ultimately, worldwide."
The global dimension of organized online predator networks has surfaced in other contexts as well. In the U.S., a sting operation in Florida caught a university student leader who allegedly used messaging apps to target a minor, a case that underscores how digital platforms can serve as hunting grounds.
Telegram, the messaging platform at the center of the German investigation, issued a statement asserting that "sexual violence is explicitly forbidden by Telegram's terms of service and such content is routinely removed." The company said it "fulfils all of its legal obligations in relation to such harmful content, including everything set out by" the EU's Digital Services Act.
Telegram did not respond to questions about the German cases specifically.
The company's founder was arrested in Paris in 2024 over allegations that the platform had been used for illicit activity, including drug trafficking and the distribution of child sexual abuse images. He denied wrongdoing and blamed the situation on what he described as growth-related challenges, saying the platform's expansion "caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform." That investigation remains ongoing.
The gap between Telegram's stated policies and the reality of what operated on its platform for years is difficult to reconcile. A network with chats dating to 2020, some with tens of thousands of members, sharing explicit videos of assaults on unconscious women, and the platform's response is a boilerplate statement about terms of service. Child-safety groups have long warned about apps that function as a "predator's paradise," and the German case offers a grim illustration of what that phrase means in practice.
The victims in the German cases were mostly Chinese women living in Germany. Many did not know they had been assaulted. Gebhard, the victim's attorney, said her client in a previous Berlin trial only learned she had been sexually assaulted after investigators discovered video footage.
Fu Xiao, a member of Germany's Chinese community, traveled roughly 500 kilometers to Berlin to attend the trial. She spoke with a clarity that no legal brief could match, as Breitbart reported:
"What makes one really angry is to see that such groups hate women, they have no respect. Women aren't seen as people."
Meanwhile, discussion of the prosecutions on Rednote, a Chinese-language social media platform, has been partially censored. Certain tags are more likely to get posts deleted or banned. Posts using less direct language, referring to "date rape" or "students studying abroad in Germany", have survived the censors. China's Ministry of Public Security did not respond to requests for comment.
The censorship raises its own set of questions. If the Chinese government cooperated with German police to arrest Dapeng Z., why is public discussion of the case being suppressed on Chinese social media? The disconnect between official cooperation and domestic information control is striking.
German privacy laws have also limited public access to the proceedings. Members of the public were forced to leave the Berlin courtroom during portions of the trial, and prosecutors are restricted in what they can say outside the courtroom. The result is a case of enormous public interest where many basic facts, the total number of victims, the identities of convicted defendants, the specific drugs used, remain officially undisclosed.
The broader pattern of organized predatory networks exploiting digital platforms is not new. The Epstein scandal revealed how abuse rings can operate in the open when institutions fail to act. What distinguishes the Telegram case is the sheer scale, dozens of chats, tens of thousands of members, multiple countries, and the platform's apparent inability or unwillingness to detect it.
Four members of the inner circle have now been convicted. Europol's Project Medusa has produced 57 arrests across multiple countries. Dutch, German, British, and American law enforcement are all engaged.
But the open questions are substantial. How many women were victimized? How did chats with up to 50,000 members operate for years without triggering platform safeguards? Are the German cases formally linked to the arrests in the Netherlands and the suspect in Los Angeles? What independent action, if any, has China taken beyond cooperating on a single arrest?
The coded language, "cars," "fuel," "driving," "dead pigs", was designed to hide what was happening. It worked, for years. The question now is whether the institutions that should have caught it sooner, the platform, the regulators, the governments, will face any accountability of their own.
Terms of service mean nothing if no one enforces them. And "routine removal" rings hollow when a predator network operates on your platform for half a decade.
