Bengaluru, August 4: Abhinav Srivastav, a software development engineer working in Ola’s head office at Koramangala, has been arrested by Bengaluru’s Central Crime Branch police in connection with a complaint filed by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) against him. The UIDAI also filed complaint against Qarth Technologies, which was acquired by Ola in March 2016, for misusing Aadhaar data obtained from its website without authentication.
According to the complaint, it was alleged that Srivastav has developed a mobile app containing Aadhaar-related information and he illegally used it to support the application. The UIDAI said that by exposing private information of Indian citizens, Srivastav has committed a very serious crime, the Economic Times reported.
The USP of his application — named Aadhaar KYC which was taken down from Google’s Play store — was to provide KYC (know your customer) verification using Aadhaar data.
The complaint was filed at the High Ground Police Station on July 26 and it was later transferred to Cyber Crime police. The cyber crime unit is verifying to ascertain whether he was involved in similar crime earlier.
Srivastav has been booked under sections of the Aadhaar act that outlaws access and distribution of Aadhaar data, and sections of the Information Technology act that deal with hacking, the Hindustan Times reported.
According to police, 31-year-old Srivastav is a native of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh and graduated from IIT-Kharagpur. Police said he had allegedly illegally accessed data from a e-hospital server to develop the application in January, which has been downloaded by 50,000 people so far.
After the complaint was filed, the accused went underground and was nabbed later. A local court has sent him to custody for further interrogation.
