Chinese police authorities have arrested at least eight suspects who were accused for making profits by spreading lewd information through mobile phones and on the Internet, as part of the crackdown on pornography.

The Ministry of Public Security on Friday revealed two cases the police have cracked in Shanghai and Guizhou Province during the government's campaign to make a pornography-free environment for the country's nearly 300 million Internet users.

Police authority of Shanghai Municipality discovered in April that Shanghai Caiwa Information Technology Company created more than 40 Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) sites for mobile phone users which contain some 50,000 porn pictures and 10,000 lewd video clips.

Seven suspects of the company, its boss surnamed Sheng and six other employees, have gained more than one million yuan profit by selling advertisements through those WAP cites.

The suspects also used 30 percent of the profits to hire employees to promote their business.

In Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture of southwest Guizhou Province, police authority shut down two Internet Web sites www.886XX.com and www.172se.com, in which suspect Jiang Changmao provided free downloads and online viewing of porn video clips and had gained about 80,000 yuan by selling advertisements.

Jiang also planted a large quantity of Trojan and backdoor viruses on the website which could infect Internet user's computers when downloading videos. Jiang could control the infected computers through these programs.

Officials with the Public Security Ministry warned that free porn videos and pictures are often used to attract Internet users whose personal information may probably be stolen by various computer viruses.

The Chinese government launched the Internet clean-up campaign at the beginning of this year, targeting popular online portals and major search engines such as Google and Baidu.

So far more than 1,000 websites had been blocked by the authorities for distributing porn and other lewd material.

(Xinhua News Agency July 11, 2009)