VPN vendor imprisoned for five and a half years, fined 500,000 yuan

A man from South China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison for selling Virtual Private Network (VPN) services online as China cracks down on unapproved online cross-border internet operations.

Wu Xiangyang was found guilty of building VPN servers without approval from authorities and selling VPN services online on Taobao and his personal website “fangou VPN,” according to a website under the China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate.

Wu was also fined of 500,000 yuan ($75,927) by the Pingnan county procuratorate in Guangxi.

According the report, Wu sold thousands of VPN routers and software and had earned 500,000 yuan since 2013.

In September, an IT engineer surnamed Zhao from Jiangsu was also detained for three days for illegally selling VPN services.

Zhao, from Nanjing of East China’s Jiangsu Province, confessed that he had set up a VPN account so he could read information from overseas.

Based on China’s Cyber Security Law, which came into effect on June 1, Nanjing police detained Zhao for three days and confiscated all his illegal income.

A regulation issued in January by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology stipulates that all basic telecommunication firms and Internet access service providers are barred from setting up or renting special lines including VPNs capable of accessing some overseas websites, unless authorities grant them approval.