Data of 66.9 cr persons, marquee startups across India stolen: Cyberabad police arrest one

HYDERABAD: A person was arrested by Cyberabad police for theft, procuring, holding, and selling personal and confidential data of 66.9 crore individuals and organisations from 24 states and eight metropolitan areas.

The accused Vinay Bhardwaj was found in possession of data belonging to students of the Byjus and Vedantu organisations. He additionally had information about 1.84 lakh cab users in eight metro cities, as well as 4.5 lakh salaried employees in six cities and the state of Gujarat.

Vinay Bhardwaj also had details of consumer/customer data from important organisations such as GST (Pan India), RTO (Pan India), Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, Paytm, Phonepe, Big Basket, Book My Show, Instagram, Zomato, Policy Bazar, Upstox, and others.

He sold personal and confidential data of approximately 66.9 crore people and organisations organised into 104 categories. This includes 51.9 million records of individuals and organisations from 24 states and eight cities organised into 44 categories.

Defence personnel, government employees, PAN card holders, students data from 9th, 10th, 11th, and 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, and so on were among the important data held by the accused.

The accused sold database to customers via cloud drive links through a website called "Inspire Webz" in Faridabad, Haryana. The accused possesses information on 4.5 lakh salaried workers from six major cities and the state of Gujarat.

Vinay Bhardwaj established an office in Faridabad, Haryana, and obtained datasets from Amer Sohail and Madan Gopal. He used to promote social media sites in order to resell the data to fraudsters for a profit.

Two mobile phones, two laptop computers, and data from 135 categories containing sensitive information from the government, private organizations, and people were seized by the police.

Financial data (Credit card, Debit card, Loans and Insurance) as well as personal and confidential data from Defense, Government employees, PAN card holders, High Net Worth Individuals, D-MAT account holders, students database, Doctors, Software Engineers, True-caller and Telecom Data, Trading and Stockbroking, Consulting services of crores of individuals, etc., were available with the accused.

The accused also had a PAN Card database with confidential information such as income, email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses. Data on government workers was also discovered, including their name, mobile number, category, date of birth, and so on. The police also found the database of vehicle owners, job aspirants data, real estate, constructions, manufacturing and industrial, frequent flyer travel details, NRI Database, and so on.