A judicial investigation has been opened into the discussion site coco.gg, suspected of having facilitated homophobic attacks and ambushes and closed down on Tuesday by the authorities, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau announced in a press release on Friday.
Opened by the financial and cyber sections of the National Jurisdiction for the Fight against Organized Crime (JUNALCO) of the Paris public prosecutor’s office, this judicial information relates “in particular to the offense of providing an online platform to enable an illicit online transaction organized”, which carries a penalty of 10 years of imprisonment and a fine of 500,000 euros, but also “on the laundering of the sums which were withdrawn”, specifies the prosecutor.
“The coco.gg site, two servers of which were in Germany, was closed on Tuesday and the domain name was seized,” recalls the magistrate.
“The National Directorate of Tax Investigations (DNEF) carried out tax searches, and the National Anti-Fraud Office carried out financial investigations. Bank accounts were frozen in Hungary, Lithuania, Germany, the Netherlands. More than 5 million euros were seized,” the prosecutor further announced.
“A man of Italian nationality, born in January 1980, suspected of being the administrator of the site, was questioned by the magistrates in Bulgaria, with the support of the Bulgarian investigation services” and the presence of a French magistrate and investigators, specified Ms. Beccuau.
“Three of his relatives, suspected of having played an active role in the administration of the platform or profiting from the offenses, were questioned in France by investigators from the National Cyber Unit of the Gendarmerie (UNCyber), and left free at the end of their hearing”, also announces the press release.
According to a source close to the case, these arrests took place in Gard.
The preliminary investigation began in December with the “centralization of the procedures of 71 public prosecutor’s offices, to the detriment of more than 480 victims. In total more than 23,000 facts were denounced”, specifies Ms. Beccuau.
Coco.gg was implicated in homophobic ambushes, but also for “facilitating (…) acts of child crime, pimping, prostitution, rape, sale of narcotics, ambushes, and even ‘homicides”, Ms. Beccuau said in a previous communication.
To enter coco.gg, which presented itself as a “chat site without registration”, all you had to do was enter your gender, age, postal code and create a nickname, without any control.
For several months, associations had been warning about the danger it could represent and welcomed the closure of the site on Tuesday.
