HANOI, VIETNAM — Vietnamese authorities have arrested a dozen people involved in the creation and management of what officials called the country’s largest online pornography operation. According to published reports, the action may force the closure of the website MocXXX.com, which was founded in 2006 as an educational resource for young people interested in having healthy sex lives.Most of those arrested were students between the ages of 20 and 30, according to Senior Lieutenant Colonel Tran Van Hoa, head of the country’s Anti High Technology Crimes division.

“This is the first time we have arrested so many people involved in spreading pornography in Vietnam,” Hoa told Earth Times.

According to authorities, although MocXXX’s initial raison d’etre was sincere, the site morphed into a major distributor of illicit content when members began uploading explicit videos and using the forums to exchange information about prostitutes. Police were alerted to a potential problem when the site’s membership roster suddenly rocketed from 97,000 to 300,000 people. Alexa recently ranked MocXXX 84th among the most-visited Vietnamese websites.

Officials have not closed the site because they continue to gather data from it, Hoa indicated.

“We have decided not to shut down the website because we are downloading data from it to gather evidence to charge those people,” he said, adding that MocXXX.com will be removed from the Web after authorities have gathered sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

Under Vietnamese law, people convicted of making, circulating or selling material deemed to be pornographic face fines of up to $3,000 and prison sentences of three years.