Seven men and women have been arrested in Fukuoka for allegedly violating the law on child pornography, police said Tuesday.
A joint investigative team of Fukuoka and Tokyo police confiscated hundreds of computer hard drives and other equipment the seven allegedly used to sell illegal video clips on the Internet, the police said.
Ken Morimoto, 41, president of a Fukuoka-based company that operates a Web site featuring child pornography, and his six employees were taken into custody for allegedly possessing child-porn videos for business purposes, the police said.
Police crackdowns on Internet child pornography usually reach dead ends when they learn the Web servers are based abroad. In such cases, arrests require coordination with police overseas.
Morimoto's Web servers are based in Hong Kong, and customers are directed to servers in the U.S. before they download video files from the Hong Kong servers, the police said.
But the police said they discovered the same files in Morimoto's computers in Fukuoka as those in his servers overseas, leading to the arrests.
Since Morimoto started his Web site in September 2007, its membership has expanded to more than 6,000 and his company has raked in an estimated ¥200 million, the police said.
