3 men arrested for stealing and selling data of over 15 million Thais

Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau (CCIB) officers yesterday arrested three Thai men for stealing the personal information of more than 15 million Thais and selling it to scammers who used the information to dupe victims out of money.

In February, the CCID police arrested a Thai engineer in Phuket for selling the personal information of more than 2 million people to fraudsters. After further investigation, officers arrested another Thai man for buying data from a supplement shop and selling it to the arrested engineer. The criminal was earning more than 400,000 baht a month.

The Deputy Commissioner of the CCIB, Thana Choowong, said the fraud gangs used personal information to make victims trust them and transfer the requested money. The fraudsters also developed a programme to bypass the security measures put in place by each bank.

Following the arrest of the first two suspects, the CCIB launched a special operation, the Data Guardians Operation, to arrest more data thieves. Officers found three more Thai men involved in the illegal business and raided their residences in three provinces, including Prathum Thani, Kalasin, and Udon Thani.

Police yesterday, November 6, arrested the first suspect, a 41 year old insurance broker named Pasin. Pasin sold his clients’ information to the fraud gangs. The insurance information is considered Class A data, which includes not only names, dates of birth, phone numbers and ID numbers, but also bank accounts.

The next suspect, a 28 year old Thai programmer named Nattapong, was arrested for developing a programme called API Bypass Face Scan and selling it to fraud gangs.

Bank security measures

Every bank requires users to perform a face scan for any financial transaction over 50,000 baht. The fraud gang would send the programme to the victim to bypass the banks’ security measures.

The officer arrested the last suspect, 24 year old Yodchai, for being the administrator of a Facebook page selling the data. Yodchai ran the page to sell data to customers. He allegedly confessed to obtaining the data of 15 million Thais from several dark websites and online gambling sites.

The three suspects face several charges under the Computer Act and the Personal Information Protection Act but details of the charges and penalties were not disclosed.

Deputy Commissioner Thana insisted that this case was not considered as serious as the public might think as only some of the information was in-depth, and the rest was just names and contact numbers.

Thana revealed that the authorities would be conducting further investigations into the broker case to determine how he obtained the information from the insurance company and other suspects involved.

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