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CHINA-CRIME-COMPUTERS
China jails VPN owner for over five years
BEIJING, Dec 22, 2017 (BSS/AFP) – A Virtual Private Network (VPN) seller
in southern China has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison,
official media reported Wednesday, one of the most severe sentences yet for
helping users evade the country’s “Great Firewall”.
The sentence comes as authorities clamp down on tools for circumventing the
severe restrictions on China’s internet, which prevents users from visiting a
large number of sites, including Google, Twitter and Facebook.
VPNs allow internet users to reach censored content by filtering web
traffic through servers around the world but China has cracked down on them.
Wu Xiangyang from the south Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region received the
sentence along with a 500,000 yuan fine ($76,000), after being prosecuted by
the Guangxi Pingnan County People’s Procuratorate.
Wu “illegally profitted” from setting up VPN servers and selling software
“without obtaining relevant business licenses”, a news website managed by the
Supreme People’s Procuratorate — the national prosecuting authority —
reported Wednesday.
Wu also opened an online store on Taobao, the shopping platform of e-
commerce giant Alibaba, and a “Fangou VPN” website to rent or sell VPN
software and hardware routers, reaching a sales volume of nearly 800,000
yuan, it said.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced in
January that it would ban the use of unlicensed providers of VPN services.
In September, 26-year-old Deng Jiewei was sentenced to nine months in jail
with a 5,000 yuan fine for selling VPN softwares from October 2015 to 2016.
Tech giants Apple and Amazon, too, have moved to limit their customers’
access to the tools in China in what has been seen as a voluntary move to get
ahead of the impending crackdown.
BSS/AFP/MR/ 1210 hrs