Data of Indian users on Truecaller up for sale at Rs 1.5 lakh

Turecaller is one of the most popular apps in India despite privacy related fears that the Swedish company taps your smartphone contact list, tracks your location and even reads your messages. Now, a cybersecurity expert has found that the data of the Truecaller users including names, phone numbers and email addresses have been leaked and is up for sale on the interwebs.

Turecaller boasts of a user base of 14 crore and around 60-70 per cent of it are Indians. The Economic Times report states that the database of the Indian users is being sold on the dark web for as much as Rs 1.5 lakh. The price charged for the data of the users of other countries is as high as Rs 20 lakh.

Truecaller, on its part, has investigated the reports and has denied any data breach. According to The Economic Times, Truecaller said, "It has been recently brought to our attention that some users have been abusing their accounts. In light of this event, we would like to strongly confirm at this stage that there has been no sensitive user information being accessed or extracted, especially our users financial or payment details."

Other than the caller ID services, Truecaller also offers payment services in India through the Unified Payment Interface (UPI).

"The team has been investigating the matter and has found a very large percentage of the sample data does not match or is not Truecaller data. We take the privacy of our users and the integrity of our services, extremely seriously. As we investigate, we will continuously implement new protocols to prevent any future attempts," Truecaller said.

However, not everyone is satisfied with Truecaller's response. The cyber security experts have said that the company's database that contains personal identifiers as well as the state of residence and users' mobile service providers can be filtered through by only breaching it.

Edited By: Udit Verma

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