End clap for the anonymous chat service which connected strangers! Known as a hunting ground for pedophiles, Coco.gg was involved in numerous legal cases, including rapes and murders.
Coco.gg, also called Cocoland, is closing its doors on June 25 after more than twenty years of “good and loyal service”, by decision of the national gendarmerie. Created in 2003, this anonymous chat presents itself as a social network allowing you to meet and increase your number of people, to develop a network of acquaintances, and even to find friends. It allows you to chat with other users either in public rooms, in “private rooms”, or by private message. It is possible to activate your webcam to send photos or chat live, always in public or private, to share other files, such as videos or music, and to chat via your microphone in rooms vocals.
The problem is that Coco.gg is involved in several legal cases, some of which relate to homophobic and pedophile abuse. In addition, many adolescents found themselves, despite themselves, exposed to adult content and problematic exchanges. The site owes its popularity to its simplicity and anonymity, since no registration, email or telephone are required to use it. Now the home page displays the following message: “This site was closed by the General Directorate of Customs and Excise and the National Gendarmerie, under the authority of the Junalco section of the Paris Prosecutor’s Office”. On Let’s hope it’s permanent…
Coco.gg: the perfect platform for crimes of all kinds
Coco.gg was at the heart of numerous legal cases, sometimes involving the prostitution of minors and pedophilia (see our article). For example, in 2019, West France reported that a Brest resident had managed to download 3,000 images and 160 videos of children on the chat site between 2013 and 2016. To do this, he connected daily to the site, even staying there for 8 hours per day when he was not working. Likewise, The Parisian reported in 2019 that two men had been convicted of corruption of minors – it was in reality a cyber patrol made up of gendarmes, who posed as a 13-year-old girl. At the beginning of May 2024, twelve men aged 25 to 60 were tried for having sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl, met on the Coco website.
The platform was also linked to numerous cases of extremely violent ambushes, particularly against homosexual people. In 2018, a man was even murdered after a fake meeting made on the site, as reported BFMTV. Likewise, last April, two minors used Coco.gg to lure a 22-year-old young man and kill him.
Shutdown of Coco.gg: a permanent closure?
There are plenty of sordid affairs! It was also on Cocoland that a 67-year-old man suggested that members of the forum rape his wife, whom he took care to drug. In total, more than fifty individuals are affected…
First established in France, Coco.fr was then registered on the Channel Island of Guernsey to escape the French authorities. Also, its closure does not result from a Franco-French measure which prevents Internet users from accessing the Coco site from France – and which could be circumvented by a VPN – but from a real deletion of the site. It is impossible for it to resurface at the same address, even if hosted elsewhere. On the other hand, Cocoland could well return under another URL. According to AFP, the owner of the site was arrested abroad.