Seo-yeon Park was lying beside her partner in a motel room near Sinchon, a lively neighborhood in the South Korean capital Seoul, when she was stirred awake by something moving near the foot of her bed.

A young man was standing over her, his face hidden behind a smartphone. He moved the phone from one hand to the other, readying a new angle as Seo-yeon’s partner slept at her side. Seo-yeon leapt up, and the intruder ran off. She chased him out of the motel into the streets, but he was too fast, disappearing down a sidestreet.

She figured he had picked the lock or gotten in some other way. “I was very angry because my wallet was there and my money was there, too,” Seo-yeon told me. But he didn’t want her money. All he took was her photo.

She rushed to the motel owner, urging him to call the police and asking if she could look at closed-circuit surveillance camera footage from the motel manager’s office. But the owner offered little help, telling her there was no such footage. She later learned that he’d lied to her and shared the video from the incident with the police. But the response was telling.