IT elites sentenced!, "Crossing the Wall" is an illegal acceleration of overseas pornographic websites
College degree, operator of Internet technology company, monthly turnover of the company exceeds one million yuan... When these words are bestowed on a young man in his 30s, people usually think that he is an "IT elite" or a young talent, but Zhao and his company actually provide CDN acceleration services for overseas pornographic websites.
"Crossing the Wall" to Expand Customers
In July 2020, Zhao joined an online advertising company operated by Xu. The main business of this company is to provide online advertising media and CDN acceleration services. CDN acceleration is the caching of content from the source server to servers across the country. Whenever a user requests access to a website, the CDN system automatically distributes the content to the server closest to the user, achieving fast access.
After working in a finance position for three months, Zhao, who did not have a background in computer science, was promoted by Xu to be the head of a subsidiary of an online advertising company. The company provided him with a technical consultant - Zhang. The subsidiary's main business is advertising and CDN acceleration services. According to regulations, 80% to 90% of the subsidiary's profits must be handed over to the online advertising company.
Through online recruitment, Zhao and Zhang recruited four salespeople and provided them with training on advertising and CDN acceleration services after the new employees joined. "At first, I asked the salesperson to find business through WeChat and QQ group chat, but the advertising business didn't make money, so I specialized in CDN acceleration services." Zhao explained that the newly launched subsidiary had a large initial investment, coupled with a lack of customer base, making business development very difficult.
After a few months, the performance of the novice team led by Zhao was mediocre. "Find some clients from foreign resource websites." Xu pointed the way for Zhao, "These clients' resources are nothing more than video websites that involve pornography and copyright. Due to the low website load, many people in China will lag when watching videos online at the same time. With CDN acceleration and increased load, many people will not lag when watching online, so this business has a great market."
At the instruction of Xu, Zhao arranged for four salespeople to switch to pornographic video groups on overseas chat platforms. In order to expand their business smoothly and safely, Zhang downloaded the "Crossing the Wall" software for each salesperson and guided them hand in hand on how to find pornographic websites for group chat. After successfully joining the group, salespeople will post advertisements with keywords such as "domestic CDN", "CDN low price, starting from 3 points, free testing", etc.
Using an "encrypted vest" to evade regulation
Like many companies in the market that specialize in CDN acceleration services, Xu and Zhao's companies did not create their own CDN, but only acted as agents for large companies in CDN acceleration services. The main task of a salesperson after finding a customer is to help customers who need CDN acceleration services recharge their traffic and earn a price difference by running traffic.
Why do video websites purchase traffic through Zhao and others instead of directly recharging large companies?
According to Zhao, downstream customers directly purchase traffic from suppliers, just like "retail". Due to their relatively small purchase volume, suppliers generally do not offer lower prices, and upstream suppliers have strict content review. Some domestic and foreign illegal websites and video software that directly connect with upstream suppliers will not be able to pass the review. Intermediary agents like Zhao integrate the needs of downstream companies and then purchase a large amount of traffic from upstream suppliers, which can not only obtain relatively low prices, but also provide services to some domestic and foreign illegal websites and video software.
Can content related to pornography evade supervision and pass review by finding intermediaries? In fact, Zhao has received feedback more than once that the review was not approved due to content involving pornography. In the face of this situation, Zhao and Zhang explained the rectification requirements to customers through overseas chat tools, and also guided customers to encrypt some pornographic domain names before accelerating services to avoid detection.
In this way, Zhao's subsidiary quickly gained momentum by wholesale purchasing traffic at low prices from upstream suppliers, and then using encryption and other means to retail the traffic at a higher price to illegal downstream customers. Zhao, who tasted the sweetness, always held a lucky mentality of not being investigated, while Xu repeatedly urged him to be "careful".
Making profits by manipulating data
"We calculate the money based on the CDN accelerated traffic, and the specific selling price is negotiated between the salesperson and the customer. According to company regulations, a commission of 1% is set at a base price of 3 points/GB, and for every 0.1 points/GB increase, the commission will increase by 0.1%." Zhao explained that in order to obtain more profits, they set a loss coefficient of 1.16 while earning the price difference, so that the customer can see slightly more usage traffic on their account every day than the actual usage.
"For example, on the same day, the customer saw that the usage of data was 1160GB, but the actual usage was only 1000GB. 160GB is the price difference we earned." Zhao gave an example, "We have a major customer who can only use about 86000 yuan of data for every 100000 yuan they recharge, and the middle price difference of 14000 yuan is converted into company profits."
The daily usage of Zhao's "major customers" is around 600TB, and the monthly recharge amount is over 500000 yuan. Among the many videos they illegally accelerated for this "big customer" app, one video was maliciously uploaded as a personal private video, and the parties involved discovered the consequences and reported it to the police.
Randomly select 55 videos from this app, and except for 6 that cannot be played normally, the remaining 49 have been identified as obscene items. The illegal act of Zhao and others providing CDN acceleration services for him, despite knowing that his video content was obscene, has finally been exposed.
Considering that the case was supervised by the higher authorities and the criminal methods were covert, the Jiangyin City Procuratorate intervened in advance in accordance with the law. The handling prosecutor reviewed a large number of similar precedents, proposed suggestions to assist in the characterization of information network criminal activities, and provided guidance for investigation and evidence collection in terms of case jurisdiction, subjective knowledge, fixation of upstream criminal evidence, and extraction and preservation of electronic data evidence. At the same time, it is recognized that the unit has committed a crime in accordance with the law and accurately identified illegal gains: From April to December 2021, Zhao and his company accelerated the CDN of a certain app, resulting in a total of 4.3 million yuan in illegal gains.
During the review and prosecution stage, the investigating prosecutor jointly discusses the case.
On August 9, 2023, after being prosecuted by the Jiangyin City Procuratorate in Jiangsu Province, the court sentenced Zhao, Xu, and Zhang to two years to one year and three months in prison respectively for the crime of aiding information network criminal activities, and each was fined 30000 to 20000 yuan. The company operated by Zhao and others was fined 100000 yuan for aiding information network criminal activities.
