An anonymous chat is an instant messaging service that does not require any personal registration or identity verification to participate in a conversation. Coco.gg operated on this principle until its closure. Understanding what led to this closure helps establish the right criteria before turning to another service.
Closure of Coco.gg: what the judicial investigation reveals about unmoderated anonymity
The closure of Coco.gg is not simply the result of a voluntary withdrawal. The operation involved the national gendarmerie and several European countries via Eurojust. The investigation focused on the platform’s operation, its payment system, and the criminal activities it harbored.
The platform has been implicated in cases of child exploitation, homophobia, and other serious offenses. The exploitation of seized data has fueled separate investigations into the actions of individual users, which were then forwarded to the relevant public prosecutors.
This point deserves to be noted: a service presented as “anonymous” does not guarantee that its users remain impossible to identify during legal proceedings. Servers retain technical traces (IP addresses, timestamps) that investigators can exploit. Therefore, seeking a legal alternative to Coco.gg requires going beyond the simple promise of anonymity to examine the concrete guarantees of the service.
DSA and legal obligations: what a chat must comply with in France since 2024
The Digital Services Act (DSA), applicable since February 17, 2024, regulates the obligations of digital services within the European Union. This regulation does not inherently make a chat safe and does not impose general monitoring of conversations. However, it does set out obligations graded according to the role of the service.
For a content hosting service (a category into which a chat falls as soon as it stores or transmits messages), the DSA imposes two central mechanisms:
- An electronic reporting system for presumed illegal content, accessible to any user, with prompt handling of each notification received.
- An obligation of transparency regarding the moderation measures applied, including content removal decisions and the reasons invoked.
- The designation of a point of contact for national authorities and users, allowing for direct communication in case of disputes or serious reports.
An anonymous chat that does not offer any reporting button, does not mention moderation, and has no identifiable contact person does not comply with this regulatory framework. The absence of these elements constitutes a concrete warning sign even before creating an account.
Technical criteria for evaluating a legal anonymous chat
Beyond the DSA, several criteria allow for distinguishing a reliable platform from a Coco.gg clone that would reproduce the same shortcomings. The challenge is to assess the platform based on verifiable elements, not on its marketing claims.
Active or passive moderation
Passive moderation is limited to addressing received reports. Active moderation involves the presence of human moderators or automated tools that analyze exchanges in real-time to detect abusive behavior. The difference is crucial: Coco.gg operated without effective moderation, allowing criminal activities to thrive for years.
Identification of the service provider
Any platform operating in France must display legal notices identifying its publisher (company name, headquarters, contact). A chat whose publisher is untraceable or based in an opaque jurisdiction does not provide the minimum guarantees. This verification takes a few seconds and already filters out some problematic services.
Data retention policy
A legal service must explain what data it collects, how long it retains it, and under what circumstances it may share it with authorities. The anonymity of a chat does not mean the total absence of data collection: it means that the user does not need to provide their civil identity to participate. The distinction is fundamental.
Cases of Cocoland and Bounty: why clones pose the same problem
After the closure of Coco.gg, several platforms attempted to take up the mantle. Cocoland takes the former nickname of Coco.gg and is under the scrutiny of authorities.
Bounty, another service presenting itself as an alternative to Coco, is also in the sights of authorities. These platforms replicate the model that led to the closure of the original: chat without moderation, without clear legal notices, without reporting tools.
The pattern is recurring: a site closes, a clone appears, authorities investigate, and the clone closes in turn. For a user, signing up for these services amounts to using a platform that could disappear at any moment, with the risk that their login data could be seized in the context of a procedure.
Anonymous chat and security: reflexes to adopt before connecting
Choosing a platform is not enough. A few systematic checks reduce risks:
- Check for the presence of complete legal notices on the site, with an identifiable publisher and a declared host.
- Test the reporting system before using the service: a visible and functional reporting button indicates a genuine willingness to moderate.
- Read the privacy policy to understand what data is collected and under what conditions it may be shared.
- Avoid sharing personal information (phone number, address, identifying photos), even on a platform that seems reliable.
The closure of Coco.gg and the subsequent investigations remind us that online anonymity remains relative. Anonymous chat platforms that comply with French legal standards exist, but they are distinguished precisely by their transparency regarding moderation, data collection, and compliance with the DSA. A service that refuses to display this information reproduces, to varying degrees, the model that brought Coco.gg to justice.
