Nearly 200 people suspected of organizing and participating in prostitution through the Internet have been detained in connection with what police described as the most serious nationwide online crime in recent years.

The crackdown in August was a joint cooperation effort by police from Beijing, Chongqing and Guangdong province. Police captured 14 gangs with 184 suspects, including three people responsible for making a kind of spyware, Xu Jingfeng, a senior police officer in criminal investigations for Beijing's public security bureau, said on Thursday.

Some of the suspects responsible for organizing the prostitution are from Fengtai, Haidian and Chaoyang districts of the capital, while the suspected prostitutes are mainly from Chongqing, Xu said.

The case is still under investigation, the police authority said.

According to Zhao Leike, deputy director of Fengtai district's public security sub-bureau, a man surnamed Liang from Guangdong province used QQ, an instant messaging service, to design software that collects male users' information, such as their QQ numbers, location and ages.

"The software can package many other QQ numbers as spam and send them to the male targets, and then some organizers will talk with the participants and introduce prostitutes to them," he said.

Zhao also said they arrested some prostitutes in July and all their "businesses" were based on QQ talks. "We found that two prostitutes who didn't know each other talked with the same QQ numbers, which turned out to be our key clue to uncovering the software developers," he added.

- Cao Yin