@samuelszuchan: In 2011, a fourteen-year-old in Daegu, Korea, had his bank card and PIN taken by his classmates, who drained whatever his parents deposited into the account. But this was not a one-off crime; it was ongoing. He also did their homework, bought them cigarettes, and fetched them alcohol, and when they ordered food online, they ate it in front of him and told him to pay. He even spent his evenings logged into their MapleStory accounts, grinding the levels for their characters, then handing the leveled characters back. His name was Kwon Seung-min, and in Korean schools, there's a word for what he was being used as: 셔틀. Shuttle. A 빵셔틀, bread shuttle, is dispatched to the school store every break to buy snacks with his own money, while a 담배셔틀 fetches cigarettes and a 가방셔틀 carries the bullies' bags. When smartphones arrived, the 와이파이 셔틀 was made to leave his hotspot on so the others could tether off him for free, and 셔틀질 covered kids forced to do homework and sit exams under someone else's name. The word itself came from StarCraft, where the Shuttle is a Protoss aircraft whose only job is to carry more valuable units across the map. On the imageboard DCInside it became slang for a person made to carry things, and from there it walked into actual schools. A cute, gamer-friendly term drained the act of any sense of guilt, and that was the point.

Sam Szuchan

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Region: US

Monday 03 August 2026 19:00:00 GMT