National jurisdiction for the fight against organized crime (Junalco), command of the Ministry of the Interior in cyberspace, national anti-fraud office, “cyber” unit of the gendarmerie… It required the cooperation of several French administrations, but also European ones, for example through Eurojust, the European Union agency for judicial cooperation in criminal matters, to end two decades of impunity: Tuesday June 25, instead of the usual home screen, the site coco.gg displayed an image with the logo of the national gendarmerie, announcing its closure “by the general directorate of customs and indirect rights and the national gendarmerie, under the authority of the Junalco section of the Paris public prosecutor’s office”.
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The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, who had referred this matter to the courts at the beginning of May, under article 40 of the code of criminal procedure, welcomed this operation on X (formerly Twitter). , specifying that “the leaders of this mafia platform have been arrested”.
Created in 2003, Coco was an online discussion (chat) place with unmoderated messages. Over the years, it had become infamous for being a den of the worst of the Web: organized by theme, some rooms offered innocuous discussions on leisure or politics, but others specialized in sexual or illegal content (images and pedophile videos, prostitution of minors, drug sales, etc.). The architecture of the site, where a simple nickname was enough to register and which did not keep archives of messages exchanged, facilitated all kinds of abuses.
Tried in 2019, a man from Brest (Finistère) admitted to having exchanged images and videos of child rape on Coco. It was also on the “unbeknownst” section of Coco’s chats that Dominique P., arrested in 2020, suggested that men come to his home and rape his wife, to whom he administered sleeping pills. Around fifty men are being prosecuted in this sordid affair, revealed by The world in June 2023.
480 victims
The use of the site has also been the cause of several attacks, particularly of homosexuals, trapped by promises of meetings, which turned into ambushes. There are half a dozen cases of these attacks. In 2022, three young men were convicted in Oise for setting up an ambush, from Coco, against a man, kidnapped, beaten and extorted of thousands of euros.
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