A college drop out in the state of Telangana has been booked for illegally downloading Aadhaar data from a government website. The incident was reported from the Peddapally district of Telangana and the ease with which it was carried out has sent shock waves across the state. Police authorities are still trying to figure out how this individual managed to download Aadhaar details of thousands of people.
P Santosh Kumar, a college drop did not complete his B.Sc. degree and now works as a distributor of pre-paid Vodafone SIM cards in Dharmaram in Peddapally. Kumar had leveraged loopholes in the eKYC system to illegally forge and impersonate nearly 3,000 people to activate SIM cards.
The motivation behind forging fake signatures was to activate SIM cards and earn a higher commission from the service provider. The telecom company, Vodafone pays commission based on the number of SIM card subscribers that the distributor registers with the company. Kumar successfully activated more than 3000 SIM cards by leveraging this loophole.
The scam was discovered after UIDAI’s Hyderabad office received a complaint. The company was registered by a person alleging that his Aadhaar details were fraudulently used to activate SIM cards that he purchased. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) approached SR Nagar police of Hyderabad with the complaint.
After the police investigation began, authorities came to know about this data leak in Telangana. Kumar managed to "manufacture fingerprints" by watching online videos, he went ahead and purchased a fingerprint developing machine from an online website.
The fraudster downloaded Aadhaar details along with fingerprints images from the MeeSeva link on Telangana government’s registration and stamp department’s website. It is still unclear on how Kumar was able to access this data. Police have booked Kumar under various sections of the Indian penal code and the IT Act. Further investigations will perhaps reveal loopholes in the Aadhaar system.