BEIJING: Chinese web police are cracking down on criminal suspects who made profits by running pornographic websites with proxy servers based in foreign countries.

Sichuan police department in April tracked down two porn websites "May babe" and "May Erotica," which had gained more than 100,00 yuan of profits by selling advertisement on their illegal websites since December, 2008.

To escape from Chinese web supervision, they hired a US-based proxy server. To conceal the websites' owner and its real address, the suspect maintain the websites through Virtual Private Network (VPN), a computer network using encrypted communicating protocol in the Internet.

Police authorities in eastern Jiangxi Province also located two suspects who sold US-based proxy services for the operation of pornographic websites in China.

The suspect with an Internet name of "Sino-American digital" had gained 100,000 yuan for selling four foreign proxy servers to another suspect named "Master" who created porn websites using nearly 50 domain names.

The two cases were the latest disclosed by the Ministry of Public Security in its effort to crack down on web porn.

More than 1,000 websites have been blocked for distributing porn and other lewd materials since the government launched the Internet clean-up campaign at the beginning of this year.