BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese police have repatriated from Cambodia 18 suspected members of a gang that operated a $36.5 million pornographic live-streaming platform with more than 3.5 million registered users, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.

Police in the eastern province of Zhejiang told Xinhua the gang hired more than 16,000 people to recruit members to a mobile application called “Max”, which aggregated over 110 live streaming porn platforms and stored hundreds of thousands of videos. Pornography is illegal in China.

More than 200 people linked to the platform’s operations were arrested in April but the application continued to operate and its promotion over social media strengthened following the arrests, Xinhua said.

Chinese police eventually discovered that servers for the application were located in Cambodia and “seized” the pornography platform gang in August in cooperation with Cambodian authorities, the report said.