The founder of the forum where Dominique Pelicot made appointments to rape his ex-wife surrenders to the Police

The authorities closed the Coco.fr forum on June 25, 2024 by order of the Paris Prosecutor’s Office and with the collaboration of Bulgaria, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Hungary coordinated by Eurojust, the European judicial agency. The police arrest responds to the new law that France approved to punish criminals who provide web pages to carry out criminal actions.

The investigation began in December 2023 in charge of the Paris Prosecutor’s Office for complaints of more than 23,000 acts committed through the platform. Coco.fr has been in the spotlight in recent months for cases such as that of Pelicot, but also for the murder of a 22-year-old boy in the parking lot of a supermarket in Grande-Synthe (northern France) at the hands of two teenagers, 14 and 15 years old, who had made an appointment with him through the website.

Police investigations closed the forum after the rape of Gisèle Pelicot. Dominique Pelicot, who was finally sentenced to 20 years in prison, used this website to meet his ex-wife’s rapists, on this page he used private chats to contact the numerous users who were registeredhe interacted with them during the first exchange of messages, but when he had already forged a correspondence relationship he migrated to Skype, as a computer expert already explained during the trial, to specify the details of the appointment such as the place or time. Pelicot became a VIP member of Coco.fr by paying a monthly membership to be able to chat with the rest of the rapists while maintaining anonymity.

Coco.fr, the dating site nest of rapists and pedophiles

Isaac Steidl created Coco.fr in 2003 with servers in Sofia (Bulgaria) which would later take them to Germany to finally end up on the island of Guernsey located in the English Channel, west of the coast of Normandy. The creator also decided to change his nationality and become Italian and settle in Eastern Europe. Little by little the platform grew while retaining its appearance as a forum from the early 2000s.

Users could chat while remaining anonymous and without saving conversation history between them. To enter, all you needed was a pseudonym, sex, age and zip code, without having to create an account with an email. Until the complaints from the first victims. According to the French association SOS Homophobie, more and more homophobic ambushes were taking place in different parts of the country where the attackers met their victims, showed up at the scene with several other people and beat and robbed the men with whom they had met. .

The Paris Prosecutor’s Office has denounced that “for many years Coco.fr has been a site that facilitates the commission of various crimesin particular crimes against children, pimping, prostitution, rape, sale of narcotics, ambushes and even homicides. The platform’s creator, Isaac Steidel, was arrested in Bulgaria and released along with three of his relatives last June.

Although it was believed that Isaac Steidel had been on the run, this Tuesday he turned himself in at a Paris police station and now the Prosecutor’s Office will determine if you are responsible for the actions of your users. He faces 10 years in prison and a fine of 500,000 euros.