Despite numerous victories claimed by China's police in their war against porn websites, they have only recently scored their first success in a crusade targeting overseas servers.

In a four-month war on overseas server-based porn websites, the police in Guangdong Province arrested 188 suspects and closed 270 websites, said police spokesman Guo Hongwei said Friday. But no network organizers were caught and they were capable of quickly resuming activities.

The Internet's complexity and the foreign locations of servers made it extremely difficult to track them, Guo said.

The police's first success in shutting down a network on an overseas server came in July when Suqian City, Jiangsu Province police cracked a ring operating from servers in the United States and arrested 13 people, police spokesman Shi Jiman, said Friday.

The police said they found network head Shen Qiang by monitoring bank accounts he opened using forged identification to collect fees from users.

Shen logged on to an online account in Beijing, leaving an address immediately traced by the police.

Before his mistake, Shen had denied the police any lead by logging on abroad and taking cash out of ATMs at night in disguises and in various provinces in China.

Shen earned at least 750,000 yuan from the network and hired more than 300 people to administer them. This year, he had withdrawn 300,000 yuan in cash from ATMs in southwest China's Chongqing City, northwest China's Shaanxi Province and north China's Hebei Province, said Li Mingjie, chief of Jiangsu Province's web police team.

Before the arrest, a team of four policemen spent months collecting evidence from the websites, including 500 gigabytes of objectionable material.

Shen had previously been the director of an information division at a famous foreign car maker, earning more than 8,000 yuan a month, before he resigned and became a porn site webmaster, said Li. The company's name as not disclosed.

The network Dikawen consisted of 13 websites with 12 million users and 10,000 VIP users who paid 108 yuan to 399 yuan for extra content. In addition to pornography, the websites acted as a link to prostitutes, Shi said.

China's police had been monitoring the network since early this year. In April, two of the administrators of one of the network's websites were identified as residents of Suqian.

The police did not rush to make arrests. They have learnt the only way to destroy a network is arrest its head, who would otherwise replace the IP of the website with another, and hire a new administrator, Shi said.

Moreover, the police could not hope to gain any clues from the administrators as they communicated solely via the Internet and didn't know each other, Shi said.

The police have gained experience from the case and would now take action against two further major porn site networks, Li said, declining to give names to avoid warning them.

The successful case was a breakthrough for Chinese police in cracking down on porn website networks on overseas servers, which had been a long-time headache for the police, Li said.

(Xinhua News Agency August 14, 2009)