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Data of 168mn people, defence staff stolen, 7 held: Hyderabad police
The official said the suspects ran three call centres in Noida, from where they seized a dozen mobile phones, three laptops and two CPUs, in addition to mails and tax invoices of a popular private information directory service.
Hyderabad Police in Hyderabad’s Cyberabad area said on Thursday they had busted a racket involving purchase, sale and stealing of personal data, including identity documents of defence personnel and government officials in what could have affected at least 168 million people.
The disclosure spotlights the worrying state of data privacy in the country, where it was held as a fundamental right in 2017, and highlights the persistent threat of banking frauds and identity thefts that can be carried out with such compromise.
“The investigation on the modus operandi of the gang is still going on. The quantum of money the accused have made so far has also not been known, but according to preliminary inquiries, they made at least ₹1 lakh by selling the data of 3-4 lakh (300,000-400,000) people,” said Cyberabad police commissioner Stephen Ravindra, announcing the arrests of seven people from the national capital region (NCR).
The official said the suspects ran three call centres in Noida, from where they seized a dozen mobile phones, three laptops and two CPUs, in addition to mails and tax invoices of a popular private information directory service.
The arrested were identified as Kumar Nitish Bhushan, who operated the call centre at Noida; Kumari Pooja Pal, who worked as a tele-caller; Susheel Thomar, who worked as a data-entry operator and Atul Pratap Singh, who collected data of credit card holders and sold through his company Inspiree Digital. The others were identified as Muskan Hassan, who runs a company called MS Digital Grow and sells data as a mediator and Sandeep Pal, who ran a company called Global Data Arts and used Justdial services and social media platforms to sell customers’ confidential data to fraudsters, including those indulged in cyber offences. Police also identified one of the other suspects as Zia Ur Rehman, who provided bulk messaging services for promotions.
The commissioner said the accused sold data after categorizing it, including by the nature of profession of the affected people, among 140 different categories of information. “So far, it has been found that the accused sold data to at least 100 fraudsters,” he said.
On the discovery of defence personnel as a particular victim group within the database, Ravindra said: “This will have serious national security implications. The data of defence and government employees can be used for espionage; to impersonate them and commit serious offences that may jeopardise national security. We are in the process of finding out how this data got leaked and who are the insiders who are doing it,” he added.
The other categories were meant to identify personal data such as mobile numbers and PAN numbers of various types of citizens, such as NEET students, power sector employees, government staffers, high net worth individuals, loan applicants, subscribers of insurance, and those who have credit card and debit cards.
“When any individual called the toll-free number of the information service and ask for any sector or category-related confidential data of individuals, their query would be listed,” he said.
Ravindra said it was suspected that the mobile number database of 30 million individuals was leaked from telecom service providers.
As many as 12 million WhatsApp users and 1.7 million Facebook users had also been targeted.
“The data related to the PAN card is being used to commit a large number of cybercrimes by gaining confidence with the victim by disclosing the information,” he said.
The haul is not surprising since on many occasions, several government and private sector companies have been found to be leaking personally identifiable information. But the scale of the operation and the organised selling of this data is unprecedented, if not rare.
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