Hanoi - Police in Vietnam have shut down the country's largest pornographic website, arresting a dozen people, most of whom are students, a high-ranking police official said Tuesday. "This is the first time we have arrested so many people involved in spreading pornography in Vietnam," said Senior Lieutenant Colonel Tran Van Hoa, head the country's Anti High Technology Crimes division.
Nearly all of those arrested were students aged 20 to 30 years old and studying in different universities around the country, according to state-run media.
The website www.mocxxx.com, which is still operational, is one of the largest and best-known websites designed and run by young Vietnamese.
"We have decided not to shut down the website because we are downloading data from it to gather evidence to charge those people," said Hoa. "We will close it when we get enough evidence."
The website made its debut in 2006. When it first appeared it called itself a forum to educate young people on how to have a healthy sex life. However, it soon evolved into a pornographic site, with members posting explicit videos. State media also reported that members used its forums to exchange information about prostitutes.
The police said the website became dangerous when the number of registered members jumped from 97,000 to about 300,000. Alexa Internet Inc, a service that provides web traffic data by country, ranks www.mocxxx.com 84th among the top 100 most-visited websites in Vietnam.
Hoa said he would not disclose more information about the arrests while the case was under investigation. But he did say that his department had been working with local police departments, including staking out the website's operators, for quite some time.
According to Vietnamese laws, those who make, circulate or sell books, photographs or material deemed to be pornographic can be fined up to 3,000 dollars and sentenced to three years in prison.
