2 held for stealing personal data of cellphone users

The Central Crime Branch (CCB) police arrested two persons, who allegedly used a software to collect confidential and personal data of cellphone users, for detective purposes recently. 

The arrested were identified as Nikhil Giri and Virendra Singh Rawat, both from Pune. The police recovered computers, hard discs, mobile phones, Android application package, cash and other records from the security agency and case registered in Ashok Nagara Police Station under various sections of Information Technology Act, Indian Telegraph Act and Indian Penal Code, the police said.

Nikhil Giri operates Lynx Security & Detective Services Private Limited in Bangalore, while Rawat works for Maverick Mobile Solution Priavate Limited Pune. Rawat had recently come to Bangalore to meet Giri. The police acted on definite leads, raided Giri’s firm office and arrested both of them. They were produced before the court which remanded them to police custody. The preliminary investigation has revealed that several mobile numbers of clients all over India have been snooped upon since last one year, the police said.

Giri’s firm was allegedly involved in using snooping software on Android and Blackberry based mobile phones. The firm was allegedly monitoring phone calls and messages of people, on behalf of their clients for detective purposes. The firm would receive tasks from clients, took up to monitor the activities of mobile phones of targets of clients like in domestic dispute, either of husband or wife or in case of firms, rival firms or in case of organisations, employees of organizations.

The documents and registers of the office confirmed that the firm was involved in snooping activities using software installed on mobile phones. Many clients of this company staying abroad also delegated work of snooping on individuals to this security agency, the police said.

The modus operandi is that, the company used services of mobile software developer in Pune namely Virendra Singh Rawat, who with the help of code writers, developed snooping software for Android and Blackberry based smart phones. Virendra Singh Rawat in turn had tied up with a company based in Peru named Controlem.com, to co-develop and host the developed software on their servers, the police said.

The whole software development was funded by Roberto Martinez and Piero Meza of www.controlem.com, both being Peru nationals. The security and detective agencies across India used the services of Virendra Singh Rawat to obtain personal information and other communication details of targeted persons.

How the software works?

An application for Android / Blackberry based mobile phones would be installed on the target’s mobile phone by clandestinely getting hold of the target’s mobile phone for a while, software is downloaded on to the mobile phone and installed from a link using the phone’s web browser. The installed snooping software would be hidden and not visible to the actual user of the mobile phone.

Once the software is installed and whenever user starts using the mobile, all data pertaining to his calls including conversation recordings / messages / e-mails, chats, picture and videos on the mobile phone would be automatically uploaded to a server hosted somewhere else using the target mobile phone’s GPRS data.

Even the exact geographical movements of the target in terms of latitude and longitude would be recorded and sent to the server in real time.  The clients of detective agencies would be provided with a login username and password to view the data and movements of target’s mobile phone on a web browser and  Google maps.