Chinese Police Crack Down on Cybercrime, Tianya, Sohu, Baidu BBS Services Implicated

China’s police are on the back end of a three-month long crackdown on cybercrime, and apparently, they’ve found an awful lot of it. Over the course of the crackdown, police told Xinhua, they cleaned up more than 1.2 million pieces of harmful information, closed over 7,000 illegal websites, and investigated harmful information posted on 1,075 prominent sites.

Among those prominent sites were Tianya, Sohu, and Baidu’s Tieba. The BBS services these companies offer are theoretically self-censored, but the police found that on these and many other sites, illegal information was present. These sites have apparently been given a deadline for cleaning up their acts.

The police were looking for a number of things, but specifically targeted black market sales of things like guns, bombs, stolen bank information, poisons, phone-tapping devices, etc. Criminals can’t exactly list these things on Taobao, so sales are often arranged via BBS forums, which are less easily searchable and simpler to remain anonymous on. At the same time, police were also looking for “illegal harmful information that seriously harms the stability of society” — i.e., politically sensitive information, dissident opinions, news reports about censored topics, etc.

So I guess we can all rest a bit easier knowing the Chinese internet now has fewer bomb salesmen and, uh, people who disagree with the government about stuff. Hooray? Anyway, if you’ve run across some harmful information on your own and are looking to report it, there’s a website for that right here. Happy snitchin’.

[Xinhua via Sina Tech, Image source]