AMSTERDAM: Dutch investigators, working on information provided by Austrian investigators, arrested a man who allegedly stole and sold personal data of millions of people worldwide, including from just about every person living in Austria.
The 25-year-old Dutchman was arrested in November following a tip-off from the Austrian Federal Criminal Police Office. The case was only made public by the public prosecutor’s office in Amsterdam on Wednesday, reported German Press Agency (dpa).
According to the information, there are strong indications that the suspect had offered stolen confidential data, including patient data from medical records, for sale over a long period of time.
The data is said to be that of people from the Netherlands, Austria, Thailand, Colombia, China and Britain.
Police in Austria had reportedly already been investigating intensively for more than two years after stolen records of millions of people from Austria were offered for sale on an illegal forum in May 2020.
They had finally located the man’s home address in Amsterdam.
According to the report, during house searches in Amsterdam and Almere, in the north of the capital, large amounts of equipment and software that could be used to hack into computer files was seized.
The criminal platform has since been closed down.
According to information from the Austrian authorities, nine million registration data records were involved in Austria alone. The country has about nine million citizens, so that the records involved “the full name, gender, complete address and date of birth of presumably every citizen” of the country. - Bernama
