T’gana Police bust data theft racket

Hyderabad: The Cyberabad Police have arrested a person involved in committing theft, procuring, holding and selling of personal and confidential data of 66.9 crore individuals and organisations, and of 24 states and eight metropolitan cities.

Apart from data pertaining to students of Byjus and Vedantu organisations, the accused was found to be in possession of data related to 1.84 lakh cab users spread across eight metro cities, data of 4.5 lakh salaried employees in six cities and Gujarat state.

The accused, Vinay Bhardwaj, had established an office in Faridabad, Haryana and collected databases from Amer Sohail and Madan Gopal.

He used to promote social media platforms to resell the data to fraudsters for profits.

Police stated that the accused also holds consumer / customer data of major organisations like GST (Pan India), RTO (Pan India), Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, Paytm, Phonepe, Big Basket, BookMyShow, Instagram, Zomato, Policy Bazar, and Upstox, among others.

The accused person was found selling personal and confidential data of about 66.9 crore individuals and organisations maintained in 104 categories.

This includes 51.9 crore data of individuals and organisations of 24 states and 8 cities maintained in 44 categories.

Some of the important data held by the accused includes the data of defence personnel; government employees; PAN card holders; students data of Class 9, 10, 11 & 12; senior citizens; Delhi electricity consumers; D-MAT account holders; mobile numbers of various individuals; NEET students; high net worth Individuals; insurance holders; credit card and debit card holders etc.

Police officials said the accused person was operating through a website “InspireWebz” in Faridabad, Haryana and selling database to clients through cloud drive links.

The police seized two mobile phones and two laptops, and recovered data of 135 categories containing sensitive information of government, private organisation and individuals.