Paris prosecutor’s office announces closure of controversial dating site Coco

The Paris prosecutor’s office announced the closure of the controversial dating site Coco on Tuesday June 25. The platform, at the heart of several ambush cases, particularly homophobic ones, has been regularly denounced for several months by users, some of whom are minors.

This closure was carried out under the authority of the national jurisdiction for the fight against organized crime (Junalco) of the Paris public prosecutor’s office, in conjunction with the command of the Ministry of the Interior in cyberspace (ComCyberMI), the cyber unit of the gendarmerie, the national anti-fraud office (ONAF) “and cooperation with other European countries by Eurojust“, specifies the Paris prosecutor’s office.

The discussion and dating site coco.gg, launched almost 20 years ago, is implicated in several criminal cases, notably in the Grande-Synthe drama. It is on this site that a young man, Philippe, was the victim of a murderous ambush. We also find this site in a rape case in Vaucluse between 2011 and 2020, when a retiree is accused of having delivered his wife, without her knowledge thanks to sedatives, to dozens of strangers.recruited” on Coco to rape her.

In recent years, to keep itself out of reach, coco.fr became coco.gg, a domain name registered in Guernsey, a British island but, according to information from franceinfo, these are Belgian servers, in the Union European, which host Coco.