A senior official working at China's Internet watchdog has been expelled from the Communist Party of China and is awaiting trail, accused of helping companies get negative online content removed, the country's cyberspace regulator said Monday.

Criminal proceedings against Gao Jianyun, a former senior official with central Internet security and information  leading group, has been transferred to judicial organs, the China Cyberspace Administration(CCA) announced along with another nine "typical" cases of officials and PR companies getting paid to stifle online criticism and of online extortion.

Gao allegedly "accepted huge bribes" between 2008 and 2010 from a company after helping the company to take down disparaging articles, according to the CCA. The cyberspace regulator launched a six-month campaign together with the ministries of public security, industry and information technology as well as the country's top media watchdog, against online extortion, targeting Internet regulators and media outlets who take fees for deleting posts.

The campaign seeks to regulate not only companies and websites but also the Internet regulator itself. The CCA said that what Gao allegedly did was a "typical" case of Internet regulators themselves colluding with companies and websites and assisting them to manage their online images.

 In the 10 "typical" cases the CCA published, another similar case was that of Wei Yining, former deputy head of a detachment of the Internet police in Haikou, Hainan Province who was sentenced to 10 years in jail for helping remove posts between 2009 and 2012 in return for over 700,000 yuan ($112,399).

The anti-extortion campaign has also targeted social networking websites. A Sina Weibo celebrity and self-proclaimed reporter, Ge Qiwei, has been prosecuted along with five others for taking advantage of his influence to make up stories and exaggerate facts about government agencies, public institutes and personages.

Ge threatened them with negative publicity, involving 31 cases and collecting more than 3.3 million yuan.

"Similar illegal business operations receive the most complaints [from Chinese netizens]," Peng Bo, a deputy director of the CCA, said on Thursday.