BENGALURU: City police and CCB arrested a software engineer, who was employed by Ola for developing a phone app that allegedly provided Aadhaar data verification by illegally accessing the UIDAI server.
A case was registered against Abhinav Srivastava at High Grounds police station a week ago, following the complaint by the deputy director of UIDAI, Ashok Lenin.
The app, which was available on Google Play Store, identified as Aadhaar E-KYC Verification, allegedly accessed information housed by the NIC server. The case was transferred to cyber crime police station on July 26 for further investigation. Six special teams were formed by additional commissioner of police (crime) to track the accused and they arrested him on Tuesday at Koramangala.
Abhinav, a native of Kanpur, was a post graduate in Industrial Chemistry from IIT-Kharagpur and was working for Qarth Technologies Private Limited. According to a release issued by the police, he developed the Aadhaar E-KYC Verification app in January this year and had earned Rs 40,000 from advertisements until now.
Police recovered a CPU, four laptops, a tablet, four mobile phones, six pen drives and other accessories worth Rs 2.25 lakh from Srivastava. He was produced before a Court and was kept in police custody for further questioning.
Earlier, a case was filed against Abhinav under IT Act, Aadhaar Act and various sections of IPC. While sections under IT and Aadhaar Acts are related to hacking, IPC sections were related to forgery — resulting in ambiguity over whether the case was related to hacking or forgery of a password to secure access.