Mainland police have shut down a popular internet site that enabled millions of clients to chat with naked young women online for a fee, police said at the weekend, as authorities intensify a nationwide crackdown on online pornography.
Internet police from Jingzhou, Hubei province, have cleaned up Dingxiang, a prominent adult chat room based in Chongqing that had attracted nearly 30 million registered members and earned revenue of 19.8 million yuan (HK$22.48 million) in just six months, Jingzhou police said on Saturday.
The Jingzhou police, authorised by the Ministry of Public Security to carry out the mission, began the probe in August and have arrested eight suspects in Chongqing .
The website had hired 48 women, mostly university students or graduates, Hubei police said. Members could chat with them after paying a 50 yuan registration fee and 88 yuan chatting fee, but would have to pay 988 yuan to chat with naked girls.
All three top executives of the website were well educated, the police said. One, Zheng Li, 28, is well known in the Chinese internet community for having made hundreds of millions of yuan from the successful music website Fenbei.com.
The music website was ranked the best on the mainland in 2006 but business was shrinking by 2008. That was when Zheng and two partners switched to pornographic video chatting, which had proven to be a successful business, police said.