YNOT – The Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court on Friday sentenced four Vietnamese men to spend from 15 months to two years in prison after they pleaded guilty to “disseminating depraved material” online.Nguyen Tang Truong, 26, Lam Duong Hieu, 29, Ton Anh Hoang, 57, and Nguyen Do Cong, 30, admitted operating an explicit adult website that reportedly boasted 300,000 members and attracted 100,000 visitors daily. Mocxi.com, which Truong established in 2006 as a sex-education website for teenagers, became an online pornography palace when Truong realized the profit potential of the site’s traffic.

As the website grew, Truong hired Hieu, Huang and Cong to help him manage the operation. Before Mocxi.com was confiscated and closed in November 2008, the site made between VND3.7 million and VND7.4 million (U.S. $200-$400) monthly in advertising revenues, Truong told the court.

At its height, Moxci.com offered thousands of explicit videos and images and a forum in which members exchanged information about prostitutes. Prosecutors called the website Vietnam’s largest pornography operation. Officials seized four laptops, 10 hard drives, more than 300 sex films and more than 9,000 pornographic images during raids on the four men’s homes.

In addition to the men sentenced on Friday, police arrested 16 students aged 20-30 for their involvement with the site. Eight were released without charges, and the remaining eight will be tried later, according to the newspaper Dan Tri.

Under Vietnamese law, the cultural crime of making, selling or circulating pornography may be punished by a fine of up to VND30 million (U.S. $1,700) and as many as 15 years in prison.