Chinese police have shut down a U.S.-hosted porn website and arrested 31 people allegedly running the site, including the founder -- a disabled elementary school drop-out.
The 27-year-old founder, surnamed Liu, set up the website last September, by renting a web server in the United States to dodge cyber police supervision, said police in the east China city of Nantong.
Liu was hoping that the porn business could help relieve his family's financial difficulties. With only two years of elementary school education, Liu taught himself about the Internet and English language skills and managed to set up the website all by himself, police investigators said.
The business grew and Liu employed 30 people across the country to help operate the site -- SIS360 online entertainment, which had attracted more than 40,000 registered members in more than 20 Chinese cities and provinces before it was shut down.
Police recorded more than 10,000 daily visits to the site and found more than 20,000 porn videos, 1 million porn pictures, and 3,000 erotic articles on it. One of the most watched video had been viewed 10 million times.
Nantong police said the suspects were arrested between May and July, with cooperation with police in 18 cities and regions. In Nantong alone, 85 policemen were assigned to the case.
Pornography is illegal in China. Police have launched rounds of crackdown campaigns to "cleanse" cyber space. In one of the most publicized crackdowns, more than 60,000 pornographic websites were shut in 11 months in 2010.
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