Shortly after Pavel Durov, the founding father of Telegram, was arrested by the police in France final summer time and charged with failing to stop illicit exercise on the app, a French legislation professor specializing in cybersecurity bought on-line messages from a person named Isaac Steidl.
“I wish to discuss with you,” stated an e-mail signed by Mr. Steidl, who launched himself because the founding father of the web chat web site Coco. “My case is similar to Telegram’s, and so are the costs.”
Michel Séjean, the professor, who shared copies of the messages with The New York Occasions, stated he didn’t know Mr. Steidl, had little interest in serving to him, and by no means responded. He was, nevertheless, accustomed to Coco — an internet site the place nameless customers may chat with out leaving data of the dialog.
French legislation enforcement had tied the location to hundreds of felony instances, together with the recent trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 different males, most of whom had been convicted of raping Mr. Pelicot’s now ex-wife whereas she was closely sedated, and who testified that they’d first met him on the chat web site.
The French authorities had already closed the web site in June, and the messages to Mr. Séjean prompt that Mr. Steidl was involved that they might goal him subsequent.
Final week, they did.
Like Mr. Durov earlier than him, Mr. Steidl was positioned beneath investigation on a raft of criminal charges by authorities primarily utilizing a 2023 legislation that has made France a testing floor for an aggressive new method to carry the heads of on-line platforms personally liable.
The new law permits the authorities to prosecute individuals who run the platforms and knowingly allow unlawful content material, items or providers to be exchanged whereas additionally requiring customers to stay nameless or whereas failing to maintain sure consumer knowledge.
Whereas some specialists warn that the brand new legislation stays comparatively untested in courts, it has given the French authorities a seemingly highly effective new software.
“The noose is tightening across the directors of any such platform,” stated Nathalie Bucquet, a lawyer for the French chapter of Innocence in Hazard, a baby safety group that had referred to as for Coco to be shut down.
Mr. Steidl, 44, didn’t reply to requests for an interview. However within the years previous his indictment, he took steps that made it more durable for French legislation enforcement to succeed in him. He dropped his French citizenship, registered his web site overseas and moved to Bulgaria.
Final week, he was ordered to pay 100,000 euros ($102,000) in bail and was barred from leaving France, with the duty to repeatedly examine in at a neighborhood police station.
Julien Zanatta, his lawyer, stated that Mr. Steidl willingly traveled to France to cooperate when the authorities summoned him. Mr. Steidl would “display his innocence” and was “horrified” by studies of crimes tied to his platform, his lawyer stated.
“He was upset to seek out out what had been accomplished by individuals who had misused his web site,” Mr. Zanatta stated.
Coco was first registered in 2005 with a plain residence web page and a cutesy Nineties aesthetic, with a cracked-open coconut. It marketed itself as a “good” chatting discussion board that didn’t require customers to create an account — they might entry it by offering solely a gender, age, postal code and pseudonym.
Customers may chat instantly or be a part of boards, and the location made cash by charging a small month-to-month price for entry to extra options. Within the three months earlier than it was shut down, the location’s month-to-month site visitors reached greater than 500,000 customers, based on SimilarWeb estimates.
Crucially, data of the nameless conversations weren’t saved.
Over time, the authorities repeatedly tied the site to felony exercise, and advocacy teams preventing baby abuse and homophobia had turn into more and more vocal in demanding that the authorities shut it.
Mark Pohlmann, the president of a nonprofit towards cyberviolence in France — who was interviewed by the police as a part of the investigation into Coco — stated that when conducting analysis in regards to the chat web site by posing as a feminine consumer, dozens of male customers contacted him inside seconds of logging on, usually by making sexual feedback or asking for express images.
The French police and prosecutors say that from 2021 to 2024, the platform was implicated in over 23,000 instances that concerned 480 alleged victims, together with allegations of sexual abuse of kids, pimping, prostitution, rape, drug trafficking, scams and homicides.
On the Pelicot trial, Mr. Pelicot stated that he had met the opposite males on the web site, in a personal chat room referred to as “With out her data.” A lot of the defendants denied ever seeing that exact chat room however acknowledged that they’d met Mr. Pelicot on the location earlier than shifting to different platforms.
A number of defendants on the trial stated they got here to the web site in the hunt for paid intercourse, or to purchase and promote medicine. Christian Lescole, knowledgeable fireman and longtime consumer of the web site, advised the courtroom that it began as an area to debate hobbies like chess or music.
“However because the years glided by, all of the predators and scammers began coming to Coco,” stated Mr. Lescole, who was convicted of aggravated rape of Ms. Pelicot.
Whilst the web site’s notoriety grew, its founder remained within the shadows.
Mr. Steidl appeared to stay off the web however has a really low profile on-line. His Fb page is empty. His LinkedIn web page is bare-bones. How intently Mr. Steidl managed the web site on a day-to-day foundation is unclear. Two folks recognized as moderators of the location had been arrested in July, however authorities didn’t element their actual position.
Born within the Vaucluse and raised within the Var, each areas of southeastern France, Mr. Steidl graduated from a pc science program at an engineering college in Toulon in 2003, the varsity’s head of communications stated.
Mr. Steidl owned the coco.fr area title by an organization referred to as Zenco that was registered in Toulon in 2011. In 2022, throughout the investigation that preceded the Pelicot trial, the investigating decide’s workplace contacted Zenco to request knowledge related to the case. Nevertheless it by no means acquired a solution, based on an outline of the case by the decide.
Quickly after, Ms. Steidl started pulling his firm, his web site, and himself, out of France.
By October 2022, coco.fr was redirecting site visitors to coco.gg, based on internet archives on the French Nationwide Library, indicating that it had been registered in Guernsey, an island within the English Channel.
Then, in 2023, Zenco was shut down, based on public enterprise data. That very same 12 months, in April, Mr. Steidl renounced his French citizenship, authorities data present. His lawyer says he’s an Italian citizen.
And in some unspecified time in the future, he moved to Bulgaria, the place an organization referred to as Vinci LTD was related to the location in March 2024, based on data collected by Domaintools. Vinci is owned and managed by Mr. Steidl, based on Bulgarian company registration records.
However in June, after an 18-month investigation spanning throughout Europe, French authorities shut the location down. Two of the location’s servers had been seized in Germany, financial institution accounts had been frozen in a number of European international locations, and police seized 5 million euros. French legislation enforcement officers questioned Mr. Steidl in Bulgaria, though he was not charged on the time.
Mr. Séjean, the skilled who was contacted by Mr. Steidl, stated that France’s 2023 legislation — and the creation in 2019 of a specialised nationwide cybercrimes unit — had allowed French prosecutors to take a much less piecemeal method of their focusing on of on-line platforms suspected of permitting illicit exercise to flourish.
“Earlier than 2023, you couldn’t get at it in a single fell swoop, it was damaged down case by case,” stated Mr. Séjean, who teaches on the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord.
Ms. Bucquet, the lawyer, stated the brand new legislation “tremendously facilitates” police work as a result of “the mere data of the illicit nature of the content material justifies felony legal responsibility on the a part of the administrator.”
However some critics stated making use of the brand new offense to Mr. Steidl’s web site may very well be overreaching, and that whereas the legislation has allowed prosecutors to swiftly convey fees, future convictions are unsure.
Alexandre Archambault, a lawyer with experience in digital and cybersecurity instances, famous that the primary conviction utilizing the brand new legislation, in November, was towards the creator and the administrator of a Telegram group that shared baby intercourse abuse materials — not Telegram itself or its executives.
“Does this in depth interpretation of the offense conform to European legislation?” Mr. Archambault stated. “I doubt it.”
Mr. Steidl’s lawyer stated that his shopper was being unfairly singled out.
“There are repeatedly websites which are diverted from their objective to commit offenses, and the folks in control of these websites are by no means prosecuted for complicity,” he stated.
Beneath French and European guidelines, platforms that host content material on-line can’t be held chargeable for what customers publish, and they don’t seem to be beneath any obligation to preemptively monitor for any unlawful content material.
However additionally they must have procedures permitting folks to flag such content material for elimination and to make sure some stage of cooperation with authorities — which was not the case for Coco, based on French prosecutors, who stated it confirmed “a infamous lack of moderation.”
For now, although, some advocacy teams say that closing the web site was inadequate.
“The day they shut Coco down, I despatched the police an e-mail with an inventory of over 100 related web sites,” stated Mr. Pohlmann, the nonprofit president. “It’s like saying that closing a drug dealing spot in Marseille solves the issue of drug trafficking in France.”
“Coco is the tree hiding the forest,” he stated.
Liz Alderman contributed reporting from Paris, and Michael H. Keller and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries from New York.
