China Police Network News reporter Wu Yi and correspondent Lu Minwei reported: Recently, the Shanghai police cracked a case of using "Qingfan" software to infringe on citizens' personal information in the "Lijian No. 1" operation, arrested 4 criminal suspects, and the amount involved was more than 8 million yuan.
For the majority of online social software users, the term "clear powder" is not unfamiliar. The so-called "clear powder" refers to the use of third-party application cluster software to let a WeChat account automatically send a message to all friends, and then identify and clean up those friends who have been deleted or blocked by the other party according to whether the information can be successfully sent. However, some criminals have obtained a large amount of citizens' personal information under the guise of "clearing the powder" and illegally profited.
In August this year, the Cyber Security Corps of the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau found an important clue during the network inspection: there was a superficial "clean powder" in a certain application, which was actually an illegal acquisition of user data. After receiving this clue, the Minhang Branch of the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau launched an investigation and evidence collection work for more than 2 months. As the investigation deepened, a 4-person criminal gang that used "clean powder" software to illegally obtain user data gradually surfaced.
Ms. Zheng, who is engaged in micro-business business, needs to give her circle of friends "clear powder", and when searching for an online trading platform, she found a store called "Little Sparrow Clear Powder Assistant". After paying a service fee of 5 yuan, the customer service gave Miss Zheng a login password.
Miss Zheng opened the login URL of "Little Sparrow Assistant" in the browser, used the mobile phone scan code to log in according to the customer service prompts, and then the background system began to scan the mobile phone with the scan code in depth. Subsequently, Miss Zheng's WeChat Chinese transfer assistant received an inspection report: in addition to displaying the number of detected friends, she will also block her friends' business cards and push them one by one. But Miss Zheng did not know that her personal information data had also been transmitted to the server of the criminal gang. In the process of investigating the case, the police found that due to the concealment of the means, almost all the victims did not realize that their information had been stolen, so that until the crime occurred, no one reported the case to the public security organs.
With the arrest and further investigation, the police found that criminal gangs not only used procedures to illegally obtain citizens' information, but also further profited from illegally obtained citizen information through sale and use.
After investigation, the criminal suspect Wang Mou formed a criminal gang of 4 people in April 2020, and jointly developed a program that can achieve the function of batch "clearing powder" by recruiting technical personnel Chen, Duan and Zhou.
At the beginning of the development, Wang made it clear that the application has the function of stealing citizens' personal information, but on the surface, users will not find this hidden function in the process of use. On the basis of illegally obtaining and saving user information, the data is automatically uploaded to a transit website, which has data upload, download and statistics functions.
Users who demand traffic become members of the transit website by recharging and registering. By paying part of the fee, the criminal gang uses the stolen citizens' personal information to provide customers with a large number of so-called "swipes" and "likes" and the network traffic services required by customers. As of the time of the case, the police found through checking the flow records that the criminal gang had illegally profited more than 8 million yuan through 14 months of operation and maintenance, and more than 300 agent online stores participated in the sale of this application.
In mid-to-late September, under the guidance of the Municipal Bureau's Cyber Security Corps, the Minhang police successively launched a network collection operation in Shanghai, Sichuan, Zhejiang, and Hunan, and arrested 4 criminal suspects. At present, Zhou mou has been criminally detained by the Minhang sub-bureau in accordance with the law, and Duan and three other people have been approved and arrested by the Minhang District People's Procuratorate for suspected crimes of infringing on citizens' personal information, and the case is under further trial.
Infringement of citizens' personal information is an important part of the network black and gray production, the next stage, the Shanghai police will continue to take the "Sword No. 1" special action as the traction, make every effort to crack down on relevant cases, and provide a safer, stable and orderly social security environment for social and economic development.