The Chinese received 5.5 years and $ 76 thousand fine for selling access to VPN

A man in southern China sentenced to 5.5 years in prison for selling accounts to a VPN. The service allows you to bypass censorship and get access to blocked sites, such as Facebook, Google and Gmail. In China, the work of VPN services to circumvent censorship is partially prohibited, as in Russia , so this case is very indicative in terms of the prospects for the exchange of experience .

A certain Wu Xiangyang, a resident of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, received a prison sentence. In addition, he was fined 500,000 yuan (approximately $ 76,010) for not having a business license, reports Xinhua.

The man is suspected that from 2013 to June 2017 he supported the work of his unregistered illegal VPN service, which redirected user traffic through other regions. The offender also provided users with software and sold modified routers with which it was possible to open forbidden sites.

According to investigators, over the years, Wu Xiangyan received income of 792,638 yuan and about 500,000 "illegal" profits. In accordance with the principles of justice, he was fined that amount.
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The offender acted extremely carelessly. Instead of quiet underground trading accounts, he launched a large commercial activity. In particular, he advertised a VPN service on his website, on the popular Taobao shopping portal and on social networks. He directly advertised the service as an opportunity to gain access to prohibited resources. At the moment, his site with advertising services authorities removed from the Internet.

In March last year, a man, on behalf of his company, tweeted that the company’s services were used by 8,000 foreigners and 5,000 companies. Apparently, among the companies, many are also foreign. It is foreign business that most often needs access to Western sites and services. It is necessary for work. Simple Chinese, like ordinary Russians, have enough local resources - social networks, instant messengers and search engines with carefully filtered information. But for foreign companies it is difficult without the usual tools.

Among banned sites in China are Gmail, Google, Google Maps, Google Docs, Google APIs, Google Plus, Facebook, YouTube, Chinese Wikipedia, Twitter, Blogspot, Instagram, xHamster, Pinterest, Pornhub, The Pirate Bay, The New York Times, Dropbox, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Slack, Archive.org (Internet Archive), Scribd, Bloomberg, Wikileaks, Flickr, SlideShare, Wall Street Journal, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Disqus, Reuters and many others.

In Russia, only SlideShare seems to be blocked from this list, the rest are still working.

The arrest of Wu Xiannya was the result of a national campaign to “clean up” the Internet from illegal tools to circumvent censorship, which the Chinese authorities announced in January of this year. Unauthorized VPN services are one of the main targets of this campaign. In March 2017, another entrepreneur Deng Jiewei, who provided VPN services, was sentenced to 9 months in prison .

VPN services are partially legalized in China. Locals say that, in principle, it is possible to establish such a VPN for personal needs on a cloud hosting. You will not be sent to prison, unless you have to close the service if the police find out about him. You can even provide access to this service to several friends, if there are not too many of them and access is free. Again, until the police find out. But if you sell access to money for other people, then you cannot avoid imprisonment. Actually, for the very use of the services there is no criminal punishment, only for the sale. And even selling a VPN can be legal if you officially register, get a license and meet all the necessary requirements. But the "official" VPN providers also live in a difficult situation: earlier this year, the official providers of GreenVPN and Haibei VPN stopped working.

For end users, illegal VPNs are also gradually being penalized. The local press writes that in Chongqing this year, they imposed fines of up to 15,000 yuan ($ 2,280) for customers of illegal VPNs.