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Hyderabad: A person involved in the illegal acquisition and sale of personal and confidential data of 66.9 crore people & organisations in 104 categories across 24 states and 8 metropolitan cities was arrested by the Cyberabad police after they busted one of the biggest ever data theft cases.
How accused obtained the data
The accused, identified as Vinay Bhardwaj, established an office in Faridabad and collected data from Amer Sohail and Madan Gopal. He used social media platforms to resell the data to fraudsters for profits, as reported by NewsMeter.
The accused allegedly possessed 18 lakh students’ records from Byju’s and Vedantu, 1.84 lakh records for cab users, and 4.5 lakh records for salaried workers spread across six cities and Gujarat state.
The accused was found in possession of consumer/customer data of major organisations like GST & RTO (Pan India), Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Paytm, PhonePe, Big Basket, BookMyShow, Instagram, Zomato, Policy Bazaar, and Upstor, among others.
Defence personnel, government employees, PAN card holders, students’ data of grades 9 to 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, were some of the categories included.
Images from Cyderabad police of data stolenData stolen from different platforms
Paytym – 50 lakhs
PhonePe – 1.8 lakhs
YouTube – 62.3 lakhs
Netflix – 22 lakhs
GST – 25 lakhs
RTO – 10 lakhs CRED
App – 3 lakhs
Policy Bazar – 7.8 lakhs
Amazon – 10.2 lakhs
Book My Show – 53.5 lakhs
Instagram – 9.4 lakhs
Facebook and Instagram – 800 URLs
Data of students – 2 crore
Neet students – 1.8 lakhs
Class 9-12 students data – 1.5 crore
NRI data – 1.2 lakhs
Statewise stolen data count
Sate wise data stolenCyberabad police says
The accused has been selling data for the last 8-10 months and was operating through a website called “Inspire Webz” in Faridabad, Haryana. He was selling the data to clients through cloud drive links.
The police seized two mobile phones, two laptops, and data of 135 categories containing sensitive information of government, private organisations, and individuals, as per the report of NewsMeter.
The Cyberabad police have advised people to be cautious and verify the authenticity of calls and messages from unknown sources.
They have urged the public to change their passwords and not share personal information with anyone they do not trust.
