Chinese police have warned Internet third-party payment businesses against providing services for those providing pornographic and lewd material online.

The Ministry of Public Security on Monday said third-party payment platforms, who act as intermediaries for payments between buyers and sellers of goods and services on the Internet, would face prosecution if they deliberately provided such services for illegal material.

The ministry released a statement Monday detailing one case in north China's Hebei Province, in which people were charged for selling membership to view porn through the third-party payments.

Police in Hebei detected in April that 23 people who allegedly owned and ran the website "Love City" had gained 800,000 yuan by selling more than 8,000 memberships through the e-payment platforms such as Alipay, PayPal and YeePay.

The police authorities warned the third-party payment platforms that they could be charged with complicity if they deliberately provided services to those dealing in pornography.

The ministry also named and shamed Chinese web portal Tencent Inc. for spreading lewd information, saying the QQ personal blog spaces operated by the company were one of the largest sources of porn and lewd content.

According to the statement, police in south Guangdong's Dongguan city in March arrested a man surnamed Chen, who posted a large amount of pornographic pictures, video clips and novels in the blog space of his QQ account.

In central China's Hunan in May, police arrested a person surnamed Wang on suspicion of making pornographic and lewd materials with a computer camera and selling them to QQ messenger users who paid with "Q money," a virtual currency.

The three cases were the latest disclosed by the Ministry of Public Security in its effort to crack down on web porn.

More than 1,000 websites have been blocked for distributing porn and other lewd materials since the government launched the Internet clean-up campaign at the beginning of this year.

(Xinhua News Agency July 14, 2009)