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Chinese student's smut obsession lands 2,000 in JAIL

Living in China is such a drag ... a mum took away your best porno site

Chinese police have smashed a major internet porn site and arrested more than 2,000 suspected users after being alerted to its existence by a mother who spied on her son after she noticed his school grades were slipping.

Pornography is banned in China and local Public Security Bureau initiatives are often launched to “clean up the internet”, but this one is something of a coup for police.

"MM Apartments" was a members-only BBS-style service with over one million eager porn fans signed up, according to a report on Sina Tech (via TechInAsia).

Members apparently either had to pay or upload their own porn to the site in order to join.

Presumably taking no pleasure in their work whatsoever, police downloaded over 1TB of porn in the course of their painstaking investigation and unsurprisingly found a fair smattering of kids using the site, including some under the age of 14.

In fact, that’s how the smutty site was discovered. A Beijing Mum, concerned about her son’s slipping high school grades, decided to see exactly how he was spending his study time and uncovered the dirty secret.

In the end, the operation required police from over 30 different forces all over the country to cuff some of the site’s worst offenders and administrators.

MM Apartments had apparently been in operation since 2009, was hosted in the US, and frequently changed domain names to avoid detection.

Investigators complained that the several-months long crackdown could have been made easier if operators were forced to retain internet logs for longer than the current 60 days.

If this all seems like a monumental waste of time to El Reg's non-Chinese readers, the case is at least notable for the police actually coming good on their promises to clean up the web.

Usually, initiatives to crack down on pornography, malware and fraudulent web sites are nothing more than a cover for something far more important to Party bosses – shutting down online political dissent. ®

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