Pierluigi Paganini January 17, 2020

Chinese authorities continue operations against unauthorized VPN services that are very popular in the country.

China continues to intensify the monitoring of the cyberspace applying and persecution of VPN 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.

Since early 2019, the Chinese authorities have started banning “unauthorized” VPN services, any company offering such type of service in the country must obtain an appropriate license from the government.

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

According to an announcement from China’s Procuratorate Daily the man was also fined 500,000 yuan ($76,000). Prosecutors said the man was convicted of collecting “illegal revenue” of 792,638 yuan ($120,500) from his unauthorized activity.

Now media reports a new arrest made by Chinese authorities in the city of Taizhou, the police arrested a man with the pseudonym of Gao (29) that successfully operated VPN service since mid-2016. Gao has made more than 11 million Chinese yuan ($1.6 million) from renting access to VPN servers to more than 28,000 regular customers, he pleaded guilty in 2019 and is still awaiting the final sentence.

In December 2017, Chinese authorities sentenced a man from Dongguan to nine months in prison for operating a VPN service that allowed him to earn $2,000. Other criminal cases were reported by Chinese authorities in the following months, blocked services had thousands of customers in the country.

In July 2019, in compliance with the Chinese Internet monitoring law, Apple has started removing all IOS VPN apps from it App Store in China.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Chinese authorities, privacy)

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