from www.penn-olson.com – It has been revealed that China’s biggest ring of pornographic websites was brought down – and its US-based creator arrested – after a rare joint operation between America’s FBI and China’s Ministry of Public Security.

The chain of porn sites centered around 99 Erotic Forum (now offline) whose ringleader was the Chinese-born Wang Yong. He ran operations out of America, using US-based servers. It started in January 2002 – reports Chinese news agency, Xinhua, today – before the days of the Great Firewall which could block websites at will within the country.

From its 2002 inception, Wang Yong built up the a chain of 48 Chinese-language porn sites – aimed at Chinese speakers across the globe – on which users either collated or created their own content. By 2004, he had implemented a registration fee for premium access to the splinter cell of hardcore forums. In contrast to a centralized porn website which needs only a few key employees, the 99 Erotic Forum needed dozens of workers and hundreds of volunteer admins.

In 2005, China managed to round-up dozens of such people who lived on the mainland who worked on the ring of sites, and put them on trial (see picture right). All pornographic content is illegal in China, and profiting from it is a serious offense punishable by at least a decade in prison. (Even posting nude or hardcore images of one’s own – not for profit – can lead to jail time). All defendants were found guilty and sentenced to terms of between five and 12 years. But Wang Yong? He remained at large.

Those arrests revealed that, at the time, the main forum had 75,772 registered members, over eight thousand posts containing original photo or video content, and had illegally amassed 22 million RMB in profits. Xinhua reports that some of the content included scenes of child abuse.

Although China eventually shut down all the sites – with the help of police and a growing web filtering system, which rolled out in 2006 – it was unable to nab Wang Yong in the US in order to put him on trial. So in 2010, China reached out to the FBI.

But it took a further year for the collaboration between China’s Public Security Bureau, Chinese and US police, the FBI, and Interpol to get its man. The manhunt came to an end on June 23rd of this year, with the arrest of Wang Yong – and nine others – by US police. He will be charged with money laundering and other offenses related to his 99 Erotic Forum operations. It’s not clear if he could be extradited to China to face charges related to illegal pornographic content, which would very likely face a much tougher sentence (perhaps the death penalty?) than could be meted out in US courts.

For now, though, China – with help from the FBI – has brought one of the country’s most wanted men to justice. It now has the Great Firewall to help block such yellow websites in the future, though it’s still facing something of a losing battle against online porn, which likely occurs in hundreds of other forums (such as the easily Google-able one in the lead image), BBS, and even on webcam via Tencent’s QQ instant-messenger.