Beijing, March 3. Two men were sentenced on Wednesday to a three-year suspended prison sentence in the city of Laiyang (east) for selling VPN browsing services, which are used in China to circumvent the blocking of many international pages such as Google, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter.
One of the men, surnamed Fu, started working in the foreign office of an unspecified Chinese province and in 2016, in order to learn how to develop a software product on a foreign website, hired the services of ‘a VPN network, collects the Sina News Portal.
Using them, he saw a business opportunity and started looking for a partner with computer skills to sell similar services.
He found a science and technology university student named Wang who could develop the software and agreed with him to split the profits 50-50, the aforementioned media said.
Fu y Wang won a red of servants in countries like Singapore or Estados Unidos para dar servicio a más de 300,000 clients and it is calculated that he won a grant of 19 million yuan (2.75 million dollars, 2.59 millions of euros).
The business lasted until 2021, when they were discovered by the Laiyang Public Security Department and, a year later, formally charged with the crime of “illegal control of computer processes”.
In addition to the three-year suspended prison sentence, Fu and Wang were fined 100,000 yuan ($14,500, €13,660).
China does not allow its citizens to access platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google or Gmail, as well as the websites of a large number of foreign media, although some Chinese, especially among urban populations, have VPN access.
This type of application allows you to bypass the so-called “Great Firewall of China”, which prevents access to censored applications and web pages.
Chinese digital companies have developed alternatives to these popular Western social platforms, such as Baidu in the case of search engines, Weibo in Twitter or WeChat – both a messaging app and a social network, among other uses.
These social networks and their own applications allow Chinese authorities to control the messages circulating in their cyberspace and restrict the platforms that can access them. EFE
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