Chinese authorities have sentenced a man to 5 years in prison for selling a VPN service without the authorization

The Chinese authorities have sentenced a man to five-and-a-half years in prison for selling a VPN service without the authorization.

China continues to intensify the monitoring of the cyberspace applying, the authorities always fight any services that could be used to bypass its censorship system known as the Great Firewall.

The Great Firewall project already blocked access to more hundreds of the world’s 1,000 top websites, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Dropbox.

The Chinese authorities have sentenced a man to five-and-a-half years in prison for selling a VPN service without the authorization.

Since early this year, the Chinese authorities started banning “unauthorized” VPN services, any company offering such type of service in the country must obtain an appropriate license from the government.

People resident in the country make use of VPN and Proxy services to bypass the censorship implemented by the Great Firewall and access website prohibited by the Government without revealing their actual identity.

A Chinese court in the southern region of Guangxi sentenced Wu Xiangyang, a Chinese citizen from the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, for offering a non-licensed VPN service since 2013 until June 2017.

According to an announcement from China’s Procuratorate Daily on Wednesday, the man was also fined 500,000 yuan ($76,000).

“From 2013 to June 2017, Wu Xiangyang, the suspect Wu Xiang Yang, illegally profited without obtaining the relevant business license, set up his own VPN server on the Internet and provided a member account and login software which allows him to browse foreign websites ;” states the announcement .

“In addition the suspect Wu Xiangyang also some VPN member account password written to the hardware router, making the modified router can log in directly to the VPN, to achieve the ability to listen to foreign websites audio and video programs.”

Prosecutors said the man was convicted of collecting “illegal revenue” of 792,638 yuan ($120,500) from his unauthorized activity.

Wu Xiangyang set up his “Where Dog VPN” website on a shop created on the shopping site “Taobao” and advertised it on social media sites.

It was a successful business for the Chinese man, in March 2016 the company claimed on Twitter to have 8,000 foreigners and 5,000 businesses using the VPN service to bypass censorship in the country.

In July, in compliance with Chinese Internet monitoring law, Apple has started removing all IOS VPN apps from it App Store in China.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – VPN service, Great Firewall)

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