Your Aadhaar card details, according to a new report, may not be as safe as the government claims after all. The report now claims the UIDAI security system may not be as safe as it is supposed to be. This comes in the wake of even some companies like Facebook demanding to register the users with their Aadhar cards.
Some carriers like Vodafone and Airtel have already introduced e-KYC service with Aadhar verification too. How successful these schemes will be is entirely dependent on the security services of the UIDAI agency. Now, a report, first published by The Tribune, shows that all you need to gain access to a ‘billion’ Aadhar card details is Rs 500 and 10 minutes.
Some anonymous and unscrupulous sellers are providing unrestricted access to all the details of any Aadhaar card numbers issued in India over WhatsApp. Notably, there are over one billion Aadhaar numbers created in the country so far. The report also claims that these Aadhaar details are being ‘sold’ by these sellers for just Rs. 500 over the online payments major Paytm. The agents have, reportedly, created a gateway and a pass on their own login ID and passwords for the alleged buyers in order to access the essential details of the Aadhaar card holders, the report further claims.
You can thus enter almost any Aadhaar number in the portal in order to receive all the essential details of that specific individual depending on the data the user has submitted to the UIDAI. You can thus, upon paying a mere Rs 500, get the name, address, the photo details, the personal phone number and email address, all in one neat package.
The report also suggests that the entire racket began around six months ago. Some anonymous WhatsApp groups were created which then targeted more than at least three lakh village-level enterprise operators. These operators had been hired by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (or ME & IT). These groups could then easily leak Aadhaar details. We hope that the government will take quick take quick and prompt action.