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Pune police release sensitive information of DSK investors online
The Pune police have released sensitive data of DSK investors with the intention of awareness about registration in the list of beneficiaries on police record
The Pune police have released sensitive data of DSK investors with the intention of awareness about registration in the list of beneficiaries on police record.
The police have released a list of registered unsecured loan holders and fixed deposit investors who had given their money to the companies run by Pune-based realtor Deepak Sakharam Kulkarni (DSK), his wife Hemanthi Kulkarni, their relatives, and colleagues.
The police have a list of around 35,000 investors while the released list includes information of around 4,500 investors, according to assistant commissioner of police Shivaji Pawar who is investigating the case.
The EOW is headed by deputy commissioner of police Bhagyashri Navatake.
The Pune police Twitter handle has tweeted the link to the list of people, who filled out these forms, on their Twitter handle.
The list gives away information like phone number, account number, bank name, and IFSC along with the name of the account holder.
The two lists include 334 people who had made their investments through unsecured loans to DSK and 4,487 people who had invested money through fixed deposits.
“Cell phone numbers are points of communication and it is also where you get the OTP. A person who has access to these three pieces of information, a person can call the account holder and coax them into revealing information about their accounts. It is irresponsible of the police to do this,” said Rizwan Shaikh, a cybersecurity expert, and chief technology officer at Prestine InfoSolutions Pvt Ltd.
The realtor is now in jail along with his wife, son, and multiple employees and relatives.
These were the investors who were promised regular returns by the realtor and his wife. While the business worked for multiple years and it turned into a source of side-income for many, the returns stopped coming in 2018.
Eventually, a case for cheating and sections of the Maharashtra Protection of Interest of Depositors (in Financial Establishments) Act was registered at Shivajinagar police station and taken over by the Economic offence wing of Pune police. DSK and his wife were arrested from a hotel in Delhi in February 2019.
Eventually, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) got involved and multiple FIRs and cases were registered against the realtor in various parts of the country.
“People in those lists have already lost their money. They are desperate to get it back one or the other way. This information can be combined with other information and then used to target the people in those lists. They could argue as this is a public hearing, the data has to be public. But they could have masked the numbers. The data can be used for setting up phishing campaigns. The number of people on that list it huge. Somebody is bound to fall for the scam,” said Sudhir Shirsath, an independent cyber security expert.
The police have a record of 35,000 such investors based on complaints received during the registration of the FIR against DSK.
“The aim was to let the ones who have no registered yet to register and for those who have already registered to verify the information that has been recorded. But we will think about this angle and make necessary changes too,” said assistant commissioner of police Shivaji Pawar of EOW Pune police who is investigating the case.
As per a Maharashtra government resolution passed in February 2019 for digitisation of information, the complainants were asked to submit information in another format.
