A court dealing specifically with online crime should be set up to curb the rampant problem of theft and graft on the Internet, legal experts have urged.

"Shenzhen can use its legislative right to set up the country's first online crime court to better protect the high-tech companies and the netizens," Pi Yong, a professor with the Law School of Wuhan University, told a seminar over the weekend.

Online theft and graft have emerged as a serious problem across the Chinese mainland, which has an estimated 137 million Internet users.

Shenzhen is home to an estimated 4 million Internet users.

Some leading high-tech companies based in the city, Tencent, China's largest instant messenger service provider, Huawei Technology and ZTE, have started investing more heavily into resources to fight online crime.

But fighting online perpetrators has proven difficult for authorities who are grappling with what could technically be considered a crime in cyberspace.

"Currently we accept complaints of online violation, but we found it was quite difficult to crack down on such crime activities because no clear definition of what is a crime, and what isn't, is available to the law enforcement departments," Li Zhengxiang, an official with the Internet surveillance team of Shenzhen Public Security Bureau, said.

According to some unofficial figures, more than 1 million online theft cases occurred in China every year but only a small amount of the thieves could be punished under the current law system.

Seminar experts have warned some Internet users were becoming more savvy about how to dupe others online.

(China Daily March 20, 2007)