The platform has been implicated in several criminal cases, including the Grande-Synthe tragedy

The Paris public prosecutor’s office announced the closure of the controversial dating website Coco on Tuesday 25 June. This platform, often at the heart of ambushes, particularly homophobic ones, had been the subject of numerous complaints from users, some of whom were minors, in recent months.

The site was shut down under the authority of the national court for combating organised crime (Junalco) of the Paris public prosecutor’s office, in collaboration with the interior ministry’s cyberspace command (ComCyberMI), the gendarmerie’s cyber unit, the national anti-fraud office (ONAF) and with the cooperation of Eurojust and other European countries.

The coco.gg chat and dating site, which was launched nearly 20 years ago, has been implicated in several criminal cases, including the Grande-Synthe tragedy in which a young man, Philippe, was the victim of a fatal ambush. The site is also implicated in a rape case in Vaucluse between 2011 and 2020, where a pensioner is accused of drugging his wife without her knowledge and then handing her over to dozens of strangers recruited on Coco to rape her.

In recent years, to avoid prosecution, coco.fr has become coco.gg, with a domain name registered in Guernsey, a British island, but according to information from H24 MEDIA, it is Belgian servers, located in the European Union, that host Coco.