Pelicot affair, homophobic ambushes: the Coco website makes a comeback and turns into Cocoland | EUROtoday

It was merely renamed Cocoland. An investigation was opened on Tuesday April 28 by the gendarmerie’s cyber unit after the reappearance of the Coco website, closed in June 2024 after being implicated within the Pelicot affair but additionally for homophobic ambushes.

“The Paris public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into the reopening of the website, entrusted to the national cyber unit of the national gendarmerie,” stated the general public prosecutor on Tuesday, requested by AFP.

The Face à l’inceste affiliation welcomed “a step forward”, whereas denouncing “the insufficiency of the public response”: “despite the opening of an investigation, the site remains active, accessible, without age verification, without moderation, with complete impunity”, it deplores in a press launch.

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Under the URL deal with “cocoland.info”, “Cocoland”, which presents itself because the “really free coconut chat”, with coconuts within the background and a kitsch-toned design, was the truth is accessible on-line on Tuesday afternoon, AFP famous.

“My client is completely unrelated to the opening of the website in question,” assured AFP Me Julien Zanatta, lawyer for the Italian Isaac Steidl, founding father of the unique Coco website.

Until this reappearance, investigations into the Coco platform have been “well advanced”, in keeping with a supply near the matter.

Its founder was indicted in January 2025 in Paris for complicity in drug trafficking, possession and distribution of kid pornography photos, corruption of minors by way of the Internet and felony conspiracy.

“The proceedings against Isaac Steidl are as unjust as they are legally unfounded. The judicial information procedure will demonstrate this,” stated his counsel, Me Zanatta.

The info run from 2018 to 2024. The investigation into Coco was opened in December 2023.

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“Human trafficking”

According to the Paris prosecutor’s workplace, between January 1, 2021 and May 7, 2024, “no less than 23,051 legal proceedings linked to the Coco platform” had been opened. And 70 public prosecutor’s places of work “across the entire national territory” had transmitted procedures involving this website, to the detriment of 480 victims.

To enter coco.gg, which introduced itself as a “chat site without registration”, all you needed to do was enter your gender, age, postal code and create a nickname, with none management.

This platform has been on the middle of a number of felony circumstances, together with the resounding Mazan rape trial. For ten years, Dominique Pelicot (sentenced in December 2024 to twenty years in jail) bombarded his spouse with anxiolytics to rape her and have her raped by dozens of males recruited by way of the location coco.fr.

As early as mid-April, High Commissioner for Children Sarah El Haïry warned of the resurgence of this web site, after the revelations from Ouest-France on the looks of the Cocoland website, with a brand new URL deal with. According to her, this “return of the Coco site” is a “collective failure in the face of one of the most serious forms of violence: child crime”.

“These sites are not innocuous places, they use all the loopholes, they look for prey, the prey are children” and facilitate “homophobic ambushes, rapes, drug trafficking and human trafficking,” recalled Sarah El Haïry on April 18 on RMC.

“There are procedures that have been launched, they will make it possible to close them, we will track them down, we will harass them, we will not give them a break,” promised Sarah El Haïry.

Other platforms are inflicting concern amongst associations. Like websites the place males alternate recommendation on easy methods to drug and rape their companions.

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These platforms being “accessible from France, and in view of recent cases like that of Gisèle Pelicot, it is highly probable that French users participate and that victims in France are concerned”, alerted in a press launch on Tuesday the Women’s Foundation and M’endors pas, co-founded by Caroline Darian, the daughter of Gisèle Pelicot.

These organizations are asking French justice to open an investigation.

In March, CNN revealed the existence of those platforms and the extent of their use, in an investigation denouncing a “global rape academy”. The American channel talked about particularly the case of the pornographic website “Motherless”, which hosts greater than 20,000 movies within the “sleep” class, devoted to girls sleeping or drugged with out their data.

With AFP