An assistant manager named Vaibhav, 30, posted at a private bank’s regional office in Pune, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly leaking personal data of over 20,000 credit card holders to third-party sources, police said on Friday.
Vaibhav, a resident of Jhumri Telaiya in Jharkhand, worked in the credit card processing unit. Investigations revealed that since November last year, he had been illegally sharing sensitive data of thousands of customers.
Inspector Amit Kumar of the Cybercrime police station (East) explained that the leaked data was passed on to Saurabh Dwivedi, 28, a manager in the credit card division of another private bank in Pune. Saurabh further funneled the information to Sharad Kumar, 32, who owned a call centre serving various banks in Pune to boost credit card sales.
“Saurabh’s bank was a client of the call centre, where he acted as a liaison officer. He had previously worked with Vaibhav,” Inspector Kumar added.
ACP (Cybercrime) Priyanshu Dewan said Vaibhav was paid Rs1 for each phone number leaked. “Though Vaibhav claimed to have leaked only a few numbers, we estimate that 15,000 to 20,000 customers may have been affected by this data breach,” Dewan noted.
The scam unraveled after a 50-year-old Gurugram resident filed an FIR on January 13, reporting multiple unsolicited calls to purchase credit cards from various banks. The complainant had recently acquired a card from Vaibhav’s bank.
Following confessions and arrests of the call centre owner and Saurabh Dwivedi, Vaibhav was arrested last Thursday from Pune.
