Bank details of nearly 1 crore Indians were up for sale for as little as 10 Paise each. Delhi Police have arrested a man who allegedly was in possession of vast amount of data and sold it to fake call centres whose employees would in turn called the victims and try to obtain One Time Passwords from them.
Since these call centres already had other bank-related info of the victims including their debit card, credit card details, they easily used to siphon off money using OTPs.
Briefeing media, South East Delhi DGP R Baaniya said “Police have busted a module that sold sensitive information like bank a/c, credit&debit card details,Facebook & Whatsapp data of 1 crore people.” “The module operated in collusion with bank officials,” he added.
The suspect identified as Puran Gupta was arrested from Delhi’s Ganesh Nagar area on Monday after police began probing a complaint in which a senior citizen from Greater Kailash lost Rs 1.46 lakh from her credit card after a caller posing as a representative of Citibank tricked him into revealing his OTP.
The cops were shocked after they discovered 20 gigabytes of stolen data – consisted of credit card numbers, cardholder names, date of births and mobile numbers.
Gupta told police he used to charge between Rs 10,000-Rs 20,000 for leaking the data of 50,000 people. He also claimed that a Mumbai-base supplier used to provide him with data. However, police is probing whether employees of some banks helped him procure the data.
“He was buying the credit and debit card data for 40 paise per customer. Apart from the card numbers, expiry dates and CVVs, he was able to procure all details filled in the application forms by customers,” HT quoted an investigator as saying.
