These platforms exploit every loophole, they seek out prey, and that prey is children
Months after French authorities shuttered Coco.gg — a platform implicated in thousands of criminal acts, including the orchestrated rape of Gisèle Pelicot — near-identical websites have resurfaced, offering predators the same unguarded access to children that made the original so dangerous. French prosecutors have opened investigations, but the swift reappearance of these platforms reveals something deeper than a technical lapse: the infrastructure of harm, once built, does not simply disappear when a single node is removed. The question France now confronts is not merely legal but structural — how a society protects its most vulnerable when the architecture of exploitation can be rebuilt overnight.
- Copycat platforms mimicking the shuttered Coco.gg appeared in April with identical designs, no age verification, and no registration — open doors for predators within seconds of a child's first click.
- Undercover journalists posing as a 13-year-old girl received explicit images and sexual messages almost immediately, with some users continuing even after being told they were speaking to a minor.
- The Paris prosecutor's office has opened a formal investigation into the platforms for distributing violent and pornographic content accessible to minors, while officials have filed complaints against multiple similar chatroom sites.
- One Cocoland site was taken offline by late April, but another remained live — a reminder that removing individual platforms leaves the underlying network, the demand, and the technical know-how entirely intact.
- France's high commissioner for childhood called the reappearance a 'collective failure,' warning that these platforms are engineered to exploit regulatory loopholes and that children are the prey they are designed to reach.
In early April, French authorities discovered what they had hoped would remain buried: websites nearly identical to Coco.gg had returned. The original platform had been shut down in 2024 after generating more than 23,000 criminal reports — child sexual abuse, drug trafficking, rape, murder. Now, under names like Cocoland.cc, the same design and the same absence of safeguards were back online.
Coco.gg had become inseparable from one of France's most harrowing criminal cases. Dominique Pelicot used the platform to recruit more than 50 strangers through a chatroom called 'Without her knowledge,' orchestrating the systematic rape of his wife, Gisèle, over more than a decade. When his trial concluded in 2024, the platform's role could no longer be minimized. Its founder, Isaac Steidl, was charged in January 2025 with possession and distribution of child pornography; he has denied the charges.
The new sites operated with alarming ease. Journalists from BFM created accounts in seconds with no identification required. Posing as a 13-year-old girl, they received explicit images and graphic messages almost immediately — and some users continued even after being told the account belonged to a minor. No registration, no age check, no barrier stood between a child and an adult predator.
By late April, one Cocoland site had been taken down, but another remained accessible. The Paris prosecutor's office confirmed an investigation into the platform for distributing content harmful to minors. The owners denied any connection to the original Coco — a claim difficult to sustain given the near-perfect replication of its design and function.
Sarah El Haïry, France's high commissioner for childhood, described the reappearance as a 'collective failure,' warning that these platforms 'exploit every loophole' and that children are their intended prey. She had filed complaints against at least two additional unmoderated chatroom sites.
What the return of these platforms exposed was not a technical problem but a structural one. Shutting down Coco.gg had eliminated one node; the network, the demand, and the knowledge of how to build such spaces remained whole. Within months, new versions had emerged — each one a fresh danger to children who had no idea they were being hunted.
In early April, French authorities noticed something they had hoped would stay buried: websites that looked almost identical to Coco.gg were back online. The original platform had been shut down in 2024 after accumulating more than 23,000 reports of criminal activity—sexual abuse of children, drug trafficking, rape, murder. Now, versions with names like Cocoland.cc were operating with the same basic design, the same absence of safeguards, the same invitation to harm.
Coco.gg had become synonymous with one of France's most disturbing criminal cases. Dominique Pelicot used the platform to orchestrate the systematic rape of his wife, Gisèle, over more than a decade. He drugged her and recruited more than 50 strangers he met in a Coco chatroom called "Without her knowledge"—a space where men shared photographs and videos of women taken without consent. When Pelicot's trial concluded in 2024, the platform's role in enabling his crimes became impossible to ignore. The site's founder, Isaac Steidl, was charged in January 2025 with possession and distribution of child pornography, among other offenses. He has denied the charges.
The new websites operated with stunning speed and minimal friction. Journalists from the French outlet BFM signed up in seconds without providing any identification or age verification. When they posed as a 13-year-old girl, users began sending them explicit images and sexually graphic messages almost immediately. Even after being told the account belonged to a minor, some users continued. The platform required nothing—no registration process, no checks, no barriers between a child and an adult predator.
By late April, one of the Cocoland sites had been taken offline, but another remained accessible. The Paris prosecutor's office confirmed it had opened an investigation into the platform for "disseminating violent, pornographic, or offensive messages accessible to minors." The owners of Cocoland.cc had issued a statement denying any connection to the original Coco website, a claim that rang hollow given the near-perfect replication of its design and function. Steidl's lawyer insisted his client had nothing to do with the new sites.
Sarah El Haïry, France's high commissioner for childhood, called the reappearance a "collective failure" in confronting child sexual abuse. She described how these platforms "exploit every loophole, they seek out prey, and that prey is children." She had filed complaints against at least two additional websites operating open chatrooms with no moderation. The responsibility, she said, lay with the platforms themselves, with their creators, and with anyone who built systems designed to evade detection and accountability.
What the reappearance of these sites revealed was not a technical problem but a structural one. Shutting down Coco.gg had removed one node from a network, but the network itself remained intact. The demand existed. The infrastructure existed. The knowledge of how to build an unmoderated space existed. Within months, new versions had sprouted, each one a fresh invitation to predators, each one a fresh danger to children who had no idea they were being hunted.
Notable Quotes
The reappearance of the Coco platform amounts to a collective failure in the face of one of the most serious forms of violence: child sexual abuse.— Sarah El Haïry, France's high commissioner for childhood
My client has nothing to do with the new websites.— Julien Zanatta, lawyer for Isaac Steidl
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does a website like this keep coming back? It's not like it's hard to shut down.
It's not about the difficulty of shutting it down. It's about what happens after. The original Coco.gg was closed, but the people who used it, the people who built it, the demand for it—all of that remained. Someone saw an opportunity.
But the founder was charged. Doesn't that deter people?
It might deter him specifically. But there are others. And the barrier to entry is almost nothing. No coding expertise required, no infrastructure you can't replicate. Just a chatroom with no rules.
The journalists got in as a 13-year-old in seconds. How is that even possible?
Because there's no verification layer. No age check, no identity confirmation, nothing. The platform doesn't want friction. Friction is what stops predators. These sites are designed to eliminate it.
What does El Haïry mean by "collective failure"?
She's saying this isn't just about one bad website or one bad person. It's about a system that allows these things to exist, that doesn't move fast enough to stop them, that doesn't make it hard enough to build them in the first place.
So what changes?
That's the question no one has answered yet. You can shut down websites. You can charge founders. But if the underlying conditions remain—the demand, the technical ease, the regulatory gaps—something else will fill the space.