France wants to prosecute the founder of the Pelicot Rapes-related chat site

Soon after, Pavel Durov became the founder of Telegram was arrested Last summer, French law professor Isaac Steidl, a French law professor who specializes in cybersecurity, was accused by French police of failing to prevent illegal activity on the app, receiving messages online.

“I’d like to talk to you,” said an email signed by Mr. Steidl, who identified himself as the founder of the online chat site Coco. “My work is very similar to Telegram, and so are the accusations.”

Professor Michel Sejan, who shared copies of the messages with The New York Times, said he did not know Mr. Steidl, had no interest in helping him, and never responded. However, he was familiar with Coco – a website where anonymous users can chat without leaving a record of the conversation.

French law enforcement agencies have linked the site to thousands of criminal cases, including criminal cases final test of Dominic Pellicote and 50 other men, most of whom are accused of raping Mr. Pelicott’s ex-wife while she was on a strong sedative, and who said they first met her on a chat site.

French authorities had already shut down the website in June, and messages sent to Mr. Sejan indicated Mr. Steidl was worried he would be targeted again.

They did last week.

Like Mr. Durov before him, Mr. Steidl was also involved in the investigation on a number of felony charges authorities are largely using the 2023 law to make France a testing ground for an aggressive new approach to catching the heads of online platforms. is personally responsible.

The new law allows authorities to prosecute people who operate platforms and knowingly allow the exchange of illegal content, goods or services, while requiring users to stay away. when unable to store anonymous or identified user data.

Although some experts have warned that the new law has been relatively untested in the courts, it has given French authorities a seemingly powerful new tool.

“The noose is being tightened around the administrators of this type of platform,” said Nathalie Bucquet, a lawyer at the French division of Safety at Risk, a child protection organization that called for Coco to be shut down.

Mr. Steidl, 44, did not respond to requests for an interview. But in the years leading up to the indictment, he took steps to make it harder for French law enforcement to reach him. He renounced his French citizenship, registered his website abroad and moved to Bulgaria.

Last week, he was ordered to pay 100,000 euros ($102,000) bail and banned from leaving France, subject to regular checks at a local police station.

His lawyer, Julien Zanatta, said Mr. Steidl had willingly traveled to France to cooperate when the authorities summoned him. Mr. Steidl “will maintain his innocence” and was “appalled” by reports of crimes linked to his platform, his lawyer said.

“He was upset to find out what was being done by people who were abusing his site,” Mr Zanatta said.

Coco was first registered in 2005 with a simple homepage and a cute 1990s aesthetic, featuring a cracked open coconut. It advertised itself as a “cool” chat forum that didn’t require users to create an account – they could log in by just providing their gender, age, zip code and a nickname.

Users could chat directly or join forums, and the site was monetized by paying a small monthly fee for access to additional features. According to SimilarWeb estimates, the site’s monthly traffic reached more than 500,000 users in the three months before the shutdown.

The main thing is that no records of anonymous conversations were kept.

It’s been years, authorities many times closed site to criminal activity and child abuse advocacy groups and homophobia became increasingly vocal in demanding that the authorities shut it down.

Marc Pohlmann, president of a non-profit organization against cyberbullying in France, was interviewed by police as part of the investigation into Coco – saying dozens of male users had contacted him while researching the chat site, posing as a female user. seconds to log in, often by making sexual comments or asking for candid photos.

Between 2021 and 2024, the platform handled more than 23,000 cases involving 480 alleged victims, including allegations of child sexual abuse, fraud, prostitution, rape, drug trafficking, fraud and murder, French police and prosecutors say. mixed up.

In Pelicot’s court, Mr Pelicot said he met other men on the website, in a private chat room called “Unbeknownst to him”. Most of the defendants denied that they had ever seen that particular chat room, but admitted that they had met Mr. Pelicott on the site before switching to other platforms.

During the trial, several defendants said they came to the site to look for paid sex or to buy and sell drugs. Christian Lescole, a professional firefighter and long-time user of the website, told the court that it started as a place to discuss hobbies such as chess or music.

“But over the years, all the predators and scammers started coming to Coco,” said Mr Lescole, who is accused of aggravated assault on Ms Pelicot.

While the website grew in popularity, its founder remained in the shadows.

Mr. Steidl seems to live off the internet, but has a very low online profile. Its Facebook page it is empty. His LinkedIn the page is blank. It is unclear how closely Mr. Steidl manages the website on a day-to-day basis. There were two people who were appointed as moderators of the site was arrested in Julyhowever, authorities did not elaborate on their exact role.

Born in Vaucluse and raised in the Var region of southeastern France, Mr. Steidl graduated from the engineering university in Toulon in 2003 with a computer science program, the school’s head of communications said.

Mr. Steidl owned the domain name coco.fr in 2011 through a company called Zenco, registered in Toulon. During the investigation before the Pelicot trial in 2022, the coroner’s office contacted Zenco to request information related to the case. But he never received an answer, according to the judge’s review of the case.

Soon, Ms. Steidl began taking her company, her website, and herself out of France.

Until October 2022 coco.fr was directing traffic coco.ggaccording to internet archives In the National Library of France, it shows that it was recorded in Guernsey, an island in the English Channel.

Then, in 2023, according to public business records, Zenco closed. In April of that year, Mr. Steidl renounced his French citizenship, government records show. His lawyer says he is an Italian citizen.

And at some point, it moved to Bulgaria, where a company called Vinci LTD was associated with the site in March 2024, according to data collected by Domaintools. Vinci is owned and operated by Mr. Steidl Bulgarian company registration records.

But in June, after an 18-month investigation spanning Europe, French authorities shut down the site. Two servers of the website were seized in Germany, bank accounts were frozen in a number of European countries, and the police seized 5 million euros. French law enforcement questioned Mr. Steidl in Bulgaria, although he was not charged at the time.

Mr. Sejean, an expert contacted by Mr. Steidl, said France’s 2023 law and the creation of a specialized national cybercrime unit in 2019 have allowed French prosecutors to take a less piecemeal approach to targeting suspicious online platforms. allowing illegal activity to flourish.

“By 2023, you couldn’t do it in one go, it’s broken apart,” he said. Sorbonne University Paris North.

Lawyer Ms. Buckett said the new law makes the job of the police “much easier” because “mere knowledge of the illegal nature of the content justifies the administrator’s criminal responsibility.”

But some critics said applying the new offense to Mr. Steidl’s website could be overreaching, and that future convictions are uncertain, although the law allows prosecutors to bring charges quickly.

Alexandre Archambault, a lawyer specializing in digital and cyber security cases, noted that the first conviction using the new law, in NovemberIt was not against Telegram itself or its executives, but against the creator and administrator of a Telegram group that shared child sexual abuse material.

“Is the broad interpretation of this crime consistent with European law?” said Mr. Archambault. “I doubt it.”

Mr. Steidl’s lawyer said that his client was unfairly selected.

“There are regularly sites that are diverted from their purpose to commit crimes, and the people who run these sites are never held accountable for their complicity,” he said.

According to French and European regulations, platforms that host content online cannot be held responsible for what users post, and they are under no obligation to pre-screen any illegal content.

However, people need to have procedures in place that allow them to flag such content for removal and provide some level of cooperation with the authorities – something French prosecutors said showed “a notable lack of leniency”, which was not the case for Coco.

For now, some advocacy groups say shutting down the site isn’t enough.

“The day they shut down Coco, I emailed the police with a list of over 100 similar websites,” said Mr. Pohlmann, the nonprofit’s president. “It’s like saying that the closure of the drug-trafficking station in Marseille solves the drug-trafficking problem in France.”

“Coco is the tree that hides the forest,” he said.

Liz Alderman He prepared a report from Paris and Michael H. Keller and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries From New York.