- India’s biggest ever data theft: Personal and confidential information of 66.9 cr individuals and organizations, across 24 states and 8 metros stolen and 1 arrested.
- 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.
Hyderabad, India, April 01, 2023: Data is new age currency and some fraudsters derived plans to make quick bucks by selling sensitive data. Cyberabad Police cracked yet another biggest-ever data theft case in the country. This time it is much bigger than what was cracked a few days ago. This time Personal and confidential information of 66.9 cr individuals and organisations across 24 states and metro cities was stolen.
The accused identified as Vinay Bhardwaj was arrested. He 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.
According to Cyberabad Police, the accused was found possessing data of students of Byjus & Vedantu organisations. Also, he possessed the data of 1.84 lakh cab users of eight metro cities and data of 4.5 lakh salaried employees of six cities and Gujarat state. Further, the accused holds consumer/customer data of major organisations like GST (Pan India), RTO (Pan India), Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, Paytm, Phonepe, Big Basket, BookMyShow, Instagram, Zomato, Policybazaar, Upstox, etc.
The accused person is found selling personal and confidential data of about 66.9 crore individuals and organisations maintained in 104 categories. This includes 51.9 crores of data of individuals and organisations of 24 states and 8 cities maintained in 44 categories.
According to the Police, some of the important data held by the accused include the data of defence personnel; government employees; PAN card holders; students data of 9th, 10th, 11 & 12th standard; 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.
In this case, the accused person was operating through a website “InspireWebz” in Faridabad, Haryana and selling databases to the clients through cloud drive links.
The accused is holding data of 4.5 Lakh salaried employees of six metropolitan cities and Gujarat state.
Some of the important categories are data of Banks, Insurance & Financial Services, Doctors, Software Engineers, True-caller & Telecom Data, Trading & Stockbroking, Consulting services of crores of individuals etc including the personal and confidential data of Defence, Government employees, PAN card holders, High Networth Individuals, D-MAT account holders, students database, Financial data(Credit card, Debit Card, Loans and Insurance) was found available with these accused.
Data of NEET students with their names, father name, mobile number & their residences are also found with these accused. PAN Card database containing sensitive information on income, email ids, phone numbers, addresses etc was also found. Data of Government employees containing information on their name, mobile number, category, date of birth etc was also found.
Further, the database of the car owners of vehicles, Job Aspirants data, Real Estate, Construction, Manufacturing & Industrial, Frequent Flyer Travel details, NRI Database, etc was also identified with them.
The Police have seized from his possession two mobile phones, two laptops and Data of 135 categories containing sensitive information of government, private organisations and individuals.
