Cyberabad police have cracked yet another data theft cases 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 crore individuals and organisations across 24 states and metro areas were stolen. The accused allegedly possessed 18 lakh students’ records from Byju’s and Vedantu, 1.84 lakh records of taxi users, and 4.5 lakh records for salaried workers.
The accused, identified as Vinay Bhardwaj, was arrested. He reportedly established an office, ‘InspireWebz’, in Faridabad and collected databases from Amer Sohail and Madan Gopal. He used to promote social media platforms so he could resell the data to fraudsters for profit.
According to Cyberabad Police, the accused was found possessing data of students of Byjus and Vedantu organisations. Also, he possessed the data of 1.84 lakh taxi users from eight metro cities and the data of 4.5 lakh salaried employees in six cities and Gujarat state. Further, the accused holds consumer and 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 was 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 on individuals and organisations from 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, student data of the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th standards, Delhi electricity consumers, D-MAT account holders, mobile numbers of various individuals, high-net-worth individuals, insurance holders, credit card and debit card holders, etc.
The police has seized two mobile phones, two laptops, and data from 135 categories containing sensitive information about the government, private organisations, and individuals.