Police crack over 1,000 cases of personal information infringement in 2017

Shanghai police said on Monday they had solved over 1,000 cases of personal information infringement last year and busted over 50 gangs involved.

Thirty suspects were caught for allegedly running a website which illegally collected and sold personal information, making profits of over 2.5 million yuan (US$385,000).

The Fanglibang website and its mobile app were real estate trading platforms where users could post, look up, exchange and buy personal information.

Registered users were rewarded for leaving their personal information, and people who paid for a “package” offered by the website could look up contact information of individual users, police said.

Police in Jinshan District began an investigation in August last year.

Leaders of the gang based in Chizhou, a city in Anhui Province, are said to have admitted acquiring over 400,000 items of personal information from over 1,900 website users and selling the information over 6,000 times.

Police said they have stepped up measures to watch out for mobile apps which could be involved in infringing personal information.

By the end of last year, all online app markets registered in Shanghai have introduced safety tests and five across-the-board inspections targeting personal information theft and malicious software were carried out with a number of illegal websites shut down, police said.

In Songjiang District, a suspect was caught for allegedly making profits of over 60,000 yuan by selling more than 50,000 items of personal information to around 30 people.

The suspect is said to have taken a large number of pictures of people holding their ID cards by claiming to be working for a labor agency.