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| A Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency official gives a briefing on the shutdown of Soranet, the nation's largest porn site, at the agency building in downtown Seoul, Thursday. / Yonhap |
By Kim Bo-eun
The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said Thursday the core server of the nation's largest porn site, Soranet was shut down by the authorities in the Netherlands.
It said the server based in the Netherlands was shut down April 1.
Police also booked without detention 62 people including operators of pornography cafes within the site, advertisers and site members who allegedly gambled on the site.
Soranet is a portal through which visitors can access some 60,000 online cafes with obscene content. As it was filled with voyeur photography as well as revenge porn, police began efforts to get the site closed in March last year.
At the time, police cooperated with U.S. authorities as the server was then based in the U.S.
Soranet administrators transferred the server to the Netherlands after police announced their intensive crackdown plan last November.
The storage size of the closed server amounts to 120 terabytes, police said.
Police predict the site had at least 1 million members. They also believe that the site would have generated at least 10 billion won in profit, based on online advertising.
Police presume that multiple administrators of Soranet, believed by the police to be Korean nationals, had systematically managed the site.
The porn site started in 2003, escaping police crackdowns by moving the servers to other countries such as Japan and the U.S. and hiding the identity of administrators under false names.
Access to the site address is blocked for domestic users, but administrators have attracted Korean users by notifying them of different Internet addresses through which they can access the site.
Currently, the site is inaccessible as the server in the Netherlands has been taken offline. "We believe the administrators would back up the content and reopen another site," a police official said. "We'll keep on after them with more international cooperation."
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