Is the "upskirt mirror trick" by peeping toms really widespread these days?

Factual Questions
1

Recently I saw a news program where a ‘peeping tom’ had a stick with a mirror on the end, and would aim it next to a girl in a skirt that he would stand next to, to be able to look up her skirt.

The girl called the security in the store, and the tom was arrested.

I also heard that this is popular to do in Japan where they use the cell phone cameras (this is when cell phone cameras first started to take off).

So–how widespread is this? Why are some people so obsessed with getting a illicit upskirt view–I can understand appreciating female beauty, but this is a lot of work and risk for a grainy picture?

Or is it just exaggerated by the press?

2

There was a guy we banned from the library I worked at as a grad student. We called him the Fed Ex guy, because he had a Fed Ex uniform (ill gotten or no) and a homemade mirror gadget. So yes, it does exist - I don’t believe he took pictures, though, I think it was just for his personal enjoyment.

3

There was a joke about this in Red Dwarf tv series. The main character, Lister was reminiscing and told of a friend who taught him to shine his shoes so they were like mirrors so they could look up skirts.

4

It’s big in Japan.

5

Is it true that there’s a law in Japan that cameras must be made with a fake shutter sound, for this very reason?

6

Even if there was, I’d imagine it would be easy to circumvent it simply by destroying the little speaker inside the camera.

7

This joke goes much farther back than that.

Patent leather - a leather impressed with linseed oil that could be polished to a high reflective shine - was used commonly enough by girls as part of their Catholic school uniform (in the U.S. and probably elsewhere) to create a series of bawdy jokes that assumed that their underwear would be reflected in their shoes, making it visible to perverts.

There is even a novel, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? by John R. Powers that plays on this joke. The novel is set in the 1960s, but the jokes go back much further into the century, and possibly to the 19th century, given patent leather was introduced as early as 1818.

Switching the joke so that the man’s shoes were the reflective ones is probably just as old. Certainly it wasn’t anything original to Red Dwarf.

8

It’s pretty easy to hook up a mod to my Xbox that lets me record rented games on it, but that doesn’t mean it’s legal to do so (not making a claim either way, I don’t know).

ETA: If it was a cell phone camera, one wouldn’t want to destroy that speaker, for obvious reasons.

9

I’m not sure if it’s law or if the manufacturers did it on their own, but it certainly was made to be this way.

worked for a cellphone company in Japan for a year

10

It seems like a small group of creeps that would do this: it has to be your turn-on, and you have to be bold enough to do it, rather than just buy some porn.