The webcomics publisher Naver WEBTOON announced on August 13 that it teamed up with the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, INTERPOL, and local law enforcement to take down three English-language pirate websites that were based in North Africa. The sites hosted over 300 WEBTOON titles and had over 130 million visitors per year. The operator of the sites, which were aimed at users in the U.S. and Europe, was taken into custody, and Naver WEBTOON will cooperate with local authorities to prosecute the operator.
The three websites, which Naver WEBTOON did not name, allowed uploads of newly scanned material that then would be relayed to other bootleg sites. “This action is highly significant not only because it led to the shutdown of a large-scale illegal distribution site, but also because it resulted in the apprehension of the primary source responsible for circulating self-produced scans and translations,” Kim Kyu-nam, Chief Risk Officer (CRO) of WEBTOON Entertainment and Naver WEBTOON, said in a statement accompanying the announcement.
The shutdown comes close on the heels of two others: In May, Naver WEBTOON worked with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Interpol, and local law enforcement agencies to shut down three sites in Vietnam that had combined annual traffic of over 1 billion visits, and in January, the anti-piracy group CODA started a criminal investigation of the pirate site Bato that resulted in the closure of the site and criminal proceedings against the owner, who was located in China. CODA represents Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Square Enix, the five largest publishers in Japan. After that, according to TorrentFreak, Kakao Entertainment (parent of the Tapas platform) went after Bato’s official subreddit and Discord servers. The Discord server shut down completely, while the subreddit disaffiliated with the site.
The news comics as WEBTOON reported a $14.6 million loss in 2025 (see “WEBTOON Rolling Out AI Features“).
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Source: ICV2
