The security agencies have discovered three individuals in HCM City who sold personal information of other people. However, in fact, the personal information market has been bustling for a long time.

Everything is available on the market

If typing “Ban danh sach thong tin khach hang” (selling clients’ personal information) on Google, one would get millions of results. The sellers advertise that they have everything the buyers need, from telephone numbers, email address, to Yahoo nicks. Especially, personal information traders also promise that they would give the best support to the buyers who buy information.

“Every product or service targets concrete clients, therefore, businesses need to choose suitable marketing tools. The most important thing for goods and service providers is to successfully convey the slogans of the products and services to the targeted clients,” Bui – a nick name – advertised on Vatgia.com, trying to persuade people that they need personal information about clients so as to better understand them.

Long, a personal information seller on J....com website, advertised that he has reliable personal information database, because he once worked for a media company.

“I have updated the list of 10,000 businesses, and now I sell them for just 300,000 dong per CD,” he wrote. “If you do not feel satisfied with the list, you will get the money back.”

On www.danh....com, a personal information seller said that he has the information of 9728 directors of the companies, 1200 chairs of boards of directors, 850 members of business club, 650 members of the Saigon Business Club, 1300 clients, who are owning Mercedes, 750 people, who are owing BMW, 1300 members of the FV high grade international hospital’s members, 10,000 customers of Nguyen Kim Shopping Mall. 

One day after the police discovered the personal information sale, and took investigation about the individuals who offer to sell the information, the website was forced to shut down.

Personal information – where does it come from?

It is clear that no one wants his personal information exposed to other people. Thuy, Director of a Hanoi-based business said that this has caused big inconvenience to her.

“I just got the business license when a lot of companies contacted me and asked me to use their services. I could not understand why they got my business’ information so quickly,” Thuy complained.

She said that she only had to declare her personal information when registering business at the Hanoi Department of Planning and Investment.

H, a member of a Hanoi Real Estate Club, said that several months ago, she once received tens calls a day from the people, who invited her to buy landed property, resorts and high grade apartments in Hanoi and northern provinces.

“At first, I was very surprised when receiving the calls, because the callers well understood my income level and my interests in real estate products,” H said.

After that, she found that the callers might collect information from the forms she filled in when joining the real estate club. “I immediately asked them to stop providing my personal information to others,” she said, complaining that nowadays, instead of making calls, the callers now send emails.

Meanwhile, mobile network operators have denied their responsibility in letting the information leaked. A representative of MobiFone, said that he cannot say for sure where the information about 30,000 MobiFone post-paid subscribers in HCM City came from. Meanwhile, he affirmed that it is impossible to get information about clients from the network’s database center.

“With the current data security system of MobiFone, it is impossible to copy the list of thousands of clients,” he said.

Meanwhile, representatives of Viettel and VinaPhone both also said that the information must not leak from the two networks.

Source: Tien phong/ VNN