The Cyberabad police in Telangana arrested a gang involved in theft and sale of personal data of as many as 16.8 crore Indians, including their credit card, pan card details among other things.
According to Cyberabad Police Commissioner Stephen Ravindra, the gang had stolen the data from various online websites and sold them to cyber fraudsters.
The date was stolen from Pan India Government Employees, various banking credit cards as well as organizations like PolicyBazaar.
“They collected data in the different ways and started selling it to fraudsters. It is a biggest threat to national security. We took six accused in to our custody,” Ravindra said.
The police said that they found involvement of an agency that issued credit cards on behalf of Bank of Baroda.
The fraudsters were collecting data through Just Dial.
“We will also register cases against Just Dial organization. We noticed this type of cases earlier. We are investigating the case in an angle of who is behind the crime. We took the accused in to our custody and interrogate them,” Cyberabad Police Commissioner said.
The data collected by the gang ran into 140 different categories including details of defence personnel, mobile numbers of citizens, NEET students, Energy & Power sector, PAN card data, Government employees, Gas & Petroleum, HNIs, D-MAT accounts.
There were separate sections for students databases, woman databases, Bangalore woman consumer data, data of people who have applied for loans, insurance, credit card and debit card holders (of AXIS, HSBC and other banks), WhatsApp users, Facebook users, IT organisation employees, frequent flyers etc.
To further probe on this matter, a special investigation team (SIT) under the direction of Joint Police Commissioner Kalmeshwar has been formed on the massive data theft and sale case.
Ravindra has said that it is responsibility of the organizations related to such as banking and telecom to protect the data of the persons while collecting the data.
He also said the SIT will investigate on how the accused get saccess to the sensitive data of defence personnel containing their ranks, place of posting and email ids.
According to the police, the gang consists of Kumar Nitish Bhushan of Noida, Uttar Pradesh, Kumari Pooja Pal, Susheel Thomar, Atul Pratap Singh, Muskan Hassan, Sandeep Pal and Zia Ur Rehman had stolen the data various online websites and set up three companies named Data Mart Infotech, Global Data Arts and MS Digital Grow and selling the collected data to the cyber fraudsters through Just Dial.
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