The Special Investigation Team (SIT), formed by the Cyberabad police to probe the massive data theft and online sale racket of classified and personal information, has served notices on 21 companies, out of which eight have met them during the weekend and two more have sought additional time to appear before the officials.
One of the two absconding men in Gujarat who sold data to the prime accused Vinay Bhardwaj was nabbed and had reportedly named another individual who was served a notice, said the police, adding that they had also found 20 new websites, with some of them being hosted in India and some outside the country, which are still showing personal data for sale and they have created evidence to send them notices.
The massive data theft came to light with the arrest of Vinay Bhardwaj from Haryana, who was found in possession of confidential data of 66.9 crore individuals and organisations across India.
An officer involved in the investigation said that Big Basket had a pending FIR in Bangalore in 2020 of a similar case and that the company accepted data breach. The officials also identified 20 other websites who claim to sell personal data.
“We have also gathered information on an individual who was the creator of the Google Drive account containing the data. His identity is yet to be known but we have gained some solid leads on him. Of the 21, with eight of them appearing for questioning and two more seeking extension of dates, 11 more of them were given different dates to come down. The response has been good so far with the companies cooperating with our investigation. We also found that one of the companies which was served a notice, Policybazaar, had reported a cyber security incident last year and claimed no data breach but we are verifying the same. We also had a detailed discussion with other companies with focus on which team had access to data and why they are using it, who they are sharing with etc. We found banks to be very vulnerable with the data they outsource,” said the official.
Vinay Bhardwaj, had established an office in Faridabad and collected databases from his associates, Amer, Sohail and Madan Gopal. He used to promote social media platforms to resell the data to fraudsters for profits, which included the data of 51.9 crores of individuals and organisations of 24 states and eight cities maintained in 44 categories. Some of the important data held by the accused includes the data of defence personnel, government employees, PAN card holders, students and others.
