France probes reopening of Coco platform tied to rape, child abuse

French prosecutors have opened an investigation into the reopening of Coco, a French-language platform that reappeared under the name Cocoland after being shut down in June 2024. The site, which was registered abroad, was still accessible on Tuesday, April 28, 2026, underscoring how a platform tied to some of France’s most disturbing crimes could vanish from public view and then return under a new label.

The Paris public prosecutor’s office assigned the case to the cyber unit of the French gendarmerie, turning the inquiry into a test of enforcement across borders, hosts and domain control. The central question is not only who brought the site back online, but how a service linked to repeated criminal proceedings could stay reachable long after authorities had moved against it.

Coco became notorious during the case of Dominique Pelicot, who used a chatroom on the platform to recruit dozens of strangers to rape his heavily sedated wife, Gisèle Pelicot. That case shocked France and turned Gisèle Pelicot into a feminist icon, while also exposing how an open platform with weak moderation can be used to facilitate predatory networks at scale.

The site’s record extends beyond the Pelicot case. Authorities and reporting have linked Coco to homophobic ambushes, drug trafficking, human trafficking, rape, child sexual abuse and murder. One report said the original platform had already been involved in 23,051 judicial proceedings before it was shut down, a figure that illustrates the volume of harm attached to a single digital venue.

France’s commissioner for children, Sarah el Haïry, first raised the alarm in mid-April, warning that the return of Coco was “a real slap in the face” to promises of protection. Her intervention put the platform back under public scrutiny, but its reappearance as Cocoland shows how quickly enforcement gaps can be exploited when a site operates beyond easy national control.

The reopening now places pressure on French authorities to show whether criminal investigations can keep pace with the speed of online rebranding. For Paris, the case is a reminder that when a dangerous platform is merely renamed rather than truly dismantled, the machinery of abuse can return with little more than a new front page.