The 15-year-old wore her school uniform, unaware a stranger followed as she walked with her mother and brother through Victoria’s Mayfair Shopping Centre.
A cellphone video would later show a voyeur trailing the family, before getting close enough to slip a camera beneath the girl’s pleated skirt.
When police told the girl’s mother, she faced a dilemma: tell her daughter, or keep it to herself?
“Learning my daughter’s image had been taken and posted on child pornography websites was devastating,” she wrote in a victim impact statement read in court earlier this year.
“I have carried significant stress over how I want to tell her and how she will cope with the information once she learns the truth.”
The teen is one of 652 women and children filmed in what officials claim is the largest case of voyeurism ever reported in Canada.
Yin Yeung Derek Chan spent six years secretly recording victims throughout communities on southern Vancouver Island, filming through house windows and prowling malls and well-known stores in the heart of downtown Victoria.
In the year prior to Chan’s 2024 arrest, the voyeur was creating more than a video a day, uploading footage and photos of victims to social media, porn sites and a personal website that had over a million views before it was taken down.
Chan was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison in May — but many of the photos and videos remain online. Only a fraction of the victims have been identified.
Despite wide reporting of the sentencing, many questions remain about the police investigation and the impact of Chan’s crimes.
CBC News has spent months gathering court records, listening to audio of courtroom proceedings and reaching out to Chan’s victims.
In her victim impact statement, one woman said watching the video Chan took of her “shattered” her sense of safety.
“Seeing myself through the eyes of someone who had been hiding, watching, deliberately capturing me without my knowledge or consent — it made me feel hunted,” she said.
“This crime did not end when the recording stopped.”
Chan used delivery job to access victims’ homes
Chan came to Canada from Hong Kong as a child. Although Chan’s lawyer said the 39-year-old identifies as gender fluid, police referred to Chan using male pronouns and some victims say they saw a man hovering nearby, phone in hand.
Crown prosecutor Paul Cheeseman said Chan worked as an Uber Eats delivery driver, using the job to access apartment building laundry rooms.
“[Police] found thousands of pairs of women’s underwear in his house and a number of them were used,” Cheeseman told the court.
“So it appears he was stealing women’s underwear while he was doing these videos and deliveries.”
Chan has a history of secretly recording women; in 2019, Chan was caught filming a woman in a changing room at a Forever 21.
During Chan’s recent sentencing, the voyeur apologized to victims but offered little insight into a pattern of prolific offending. The judge said Chan compared it to the rush of “stealing a chocolate bar from a store” and attributed the crimes to “warm weather” in an earlier proceeding.
Saanich police have repeatedly declined to specify where Chan filmed victims, in spite of calls from B.C.’s attorney general to help potential victims know if they could be affected.
According to the court records, more than 400 victims were targeted at Value Village in Victoria, while about 80 were filmed at local Walmart locations. Others were recorded at Greater Victoria businesses, including Indigo Books, Munro’s Books, Shoppers Drug Mart, Michaels, Mayfair Shopping Centre, Hillside Centre, and the Bay Centre mall.
A few were sunbathing at what is believed by police to be Willows Beach in Oak Bay.
Five people were recorded through the windows of their homes and apartments, at addresses in the James Bay, Fairfield, and Hillside neighbourhoods of Victoria.
Police also found about 100 hours of other videos Chan recorded of other women at gyms and malls that “don’t rise to the level of criminal voyeurism,” Cheeseman said.
‘A part of my innocence was taken from me’
One victim told CBC News that Saanich police contacted her in January 2025 after an officer she knew recognized her in a video seized from Chan’s home.
Until she saw the video, she didn’t know Chan had snuck up behind her in an Indigo Books to film up her dress — though she remembers seeing the voyeur.
“Him being so close to me was like the most icky feeling and thing to think about, like, how did I let someone get so close to me without noticing?” said the woman, whose identity is protected by a publication ban.
“It made me scared to think of, like someone could get that close to me without realizing, like what else could they have done to me?”
For a time after she found out, the woman says she was too afraid to go out alone in public, even to the grocery store.
Just weeks ago, a man in line at a dollar store started talking to her.
“I just like, shut down in my body,” said the woman.
In victim impact statements, other women told the judge who sentenced Chan that they have difficulty holding down a job, struggle with mental health, and have changed the clothes they wear.
Some spend money on Ubers to avoid public transit. One victim said she got off a bus and walked almost an hour, because another passenger had a phone camera pointed her way.
The women said Chan’s crimes have affected relationships, eroded their ability to trust others, and left them feeling powerless.
“I feel as though a part of my innocence was taken from me,” wrote one victim, who was 17 and days out from her high school graduation when Chan filmed her.
Another victim was underage when Chan recorded her working as an employee at a mall. The incident triggered past trauma and she began to isolate herself. Her grades at a local college suffered, and she had to withdraw.
She said she was unable to maintain a job due to intense anxiety and fear in public spaces.
The woman said she gets counselling and financial support from WorkSafeBC, but the $4,900 she receives a year isn’t enough to make ends meet.
“My life has been delayed and derailed, and my future seems uncertain,” she said in her statement to the court.
“This offence did not just take away my sense of safety, it took away my independence, my ability to support myself, and my financial stability.”
Some recordings still online
Cheeseman said Chan was well known in the online voyeurism community for posting videos, which were downloaded and reposted by other users.
“Mr. Chan has made it available for the entire world to revictimize these people,” he said.
While police have gotten some recordings removed from Chan’s personal website and Flickr, the prosecutor said officials have faced challenges in getting others taken down.
A search of the username Chan used to upload many videos and images of the victims shows many are still easily found online on social media and porn websites.
One of these posts, on Reddit, is tagged “NSFW” — the site’s label for explicit content.
Comments on this post, shown in court, ask Chan where to find the videos.
“We’re all eager and ready to pay or something man you gotta bless us you got the finest bitches on camera,” writes one user.
“Will u sponsor me?” Chan writes back to another, telling a third user the videos are “only open to payers.”
Reddit did not respond to questions from CBC News about the post.
Saanich police did not answer questions from CBC News, but Deputy Chief Const. Damian Kowalewich said in a statement that “the scale of this case was unprecedented and the impact on victims cannot be overstated.”
“We recognize that once material has been distributed online it may not be possible to remove every copy, which remains an ongoing concern for many victims and represents an additional layer of victimization.”
‘None of it was your fault,’ woman tells other victims
On May 21, the day of Chan’s sentencing, Saanich police published a notice announcing the case publicly for the first time.
The victim who spoke to CBC News says it felt strange to see everyone discussing something she’d only told a few of those closest to her, especially as police promised to update her before the case became public — which she says they did not.
At first, she said it felt scary to read what people thought online about the case. But with time, it began to feel validating.
“It kind of made me feel like I was able to then be like, you know what, this was really messed up, and this happened to me, and I am allowed to feel violated by this situation, and I should allow myself time and space to have those feelings,” the woman said.
“It doesn’t devalue who you are … you didn’t do anything wrong to put yourself in this situation, and none of it was your fault.”
