A team of over 3,000 volunteers provided more than 15,000 leads on various cybercrimes such as gambling and prostitution in 2014 and 2015, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau said Wednesday.
The Beijing police began recruiting volunteer Internet monitors across the country in 2014, Beijing-based newspaper The Mirror reported Wednesday.
The Internet monitors assisted the police in fighting crimes such as fraud, prostitution, gambling and drug dealing, as well as the spread of pornography.
Volunteer monitors filed a report whenever they found false information, malicious computer programs or content related to cybercrimes, said the police.
The capital's police made more than 1,400 cautionary posts on social media platforms; issued warnings to more than 8,400 netizens for spreading false information, pornography or phishing messages; and cracked around 210 criminal cases, The Mirror reported.
Some 80 percent of volunteers are people born in the 1980s or 1990s, and they include ordinary citizens as well as Internet security professionals, news site people.cn reported Wednesday.
Police efforts to crack down on online pornography and prostitution have been facilitated by tip-offs from the volunteer monitors, The Mirror reported.
According to the report, a total of 96,000 items of pornographic information were cleaned up by Internet police, and nearly 89,000 were filtered out by websites under police guidance. Police also shut down 72 prostitution dens and detained over 700 people for prostitution-related crimes.
The monitors are seen as an unofficial team of volunteers, much like the "people of Chaoyang district," who provide information to the police and assist in maintaining public security.
In 2015, the "people of Chaoyang district" became a hot topic on China's social media after police cited them as the source of information that led to the arrests of several celebrities for drug-related crimes beginning in 2014.
