Cyberabad cops bust country’s biggest data theft, one held from Haryana 

The man from Haryana was held for possessing illegal ‘confidential data’ of about 66.9 crore individuals in the country and providing it to fraudsters

Hyderabad: Busting what is being perceived as country’s biggest data theft, the Cyberabad police arrested a person from Haryana who was allegedly possessing illegal ‘confidential data’ of about 66.9 crore individuals in the country and providing it to fraudsters. It included data of around 56 lakh Hyderabad citizens.

The arrested person Vinay Bhardwaj, who was operating his office from Faridabad, Harayana, and had allegedly collected the data base from Amer Sohail and Madan Gopal, both absconding.

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Cyberabad Police Commissioner, Stephen Raveendra told ‘Telangana Today‘ that the suspect possessed data of people from various segments of the society including students, senior citizens, defence personnel, government employees, credit and debit card holders, D- MAT account holders and PAN card account holders.

“The data of 66.9 crore individuals and organizations is from 24 States and eight Indian cities. Bhardwaj holds consumer/customer data base of Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Paytm, Phonepe, Big Basket, Book My Show, Instagram, Zomato, Policy Bazaar, Upstox, Byjus and Vedanta etc,” he said.

Police found Bhardwaj was operating his illegal activities through a website ‘InspireWebz’ and selling the database to his customers through cloud drive. The data is classified into different categories including banks, insurance and financial services, doctors, software engineers, telecom, trading & stock broking, consulting services.

“Data of defence personnel was also found with him. It contains personal information including phone numbers, residential address, email id, date of birth etc,” said Stephen Raveendra. Investigations are on about teh sources through which Bhardwaj managed to gather such voluminous data.

Last month, the police had arrested a gang who was involved in a similar fraud. The police had found that the gang managed to get data of around 16 crore individuals and allegedly shared it with several persons including fraudsters. A Special Investigation Team headed by a DCP rank official was formed by the Cyberabad Commissioner to investigate the case.

Statewise Database:

Uttar Pradesh – 21.39 crore accounts.

Rajasthan – 2 crore.

Punjab – 1.5 crore.

Madhya Pradesh – 4.50 crore

Jammu and Kashmir – 2 crore.

Madhya Pradesh – 1.10 crore.

Andhra Pradesh – 2.10 crore.

Bihar – 1 crore.

Kerala – 1.57 crore.

Delhi – 2.70 crore.

Haryana – 1 crore.

Database categories:

Job seekers, advocates, teachers, students, chartered accountants, engineers, government employees, jewellers, bank employees, credit card holders, senior citizens, NEET students, NRI data base. NGOs, software engineers among others.