AN illegal industry is emerging as some service providers are stealing and selling people’s personal information online, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported yesterday.

    A service provider’s staffer, who claimed they are based in Shenzhen, said that they could provide 11 kinds of personal records of anyone, such as hotel-stay records, travel records, criminal records and bank records, as long as they are provided with the person’s ID number.

    The staffer said that the price to obtain a person’s records is 850 yuan (US$123), while getting only a person’s hotel-stay records costs 300 yuan.

    The Daily’s reporter received a colleague’s hotel-stay records between August 2011 and October this year, after paying 300 yuan to the service provider and offering the colleague’s name and ID number. The colleague confirmed that the records were accurate.

    The staffer said that they could also check Unicom users’ call records for a 1,500-yuan charge, or locate a Unicom user’s phone for 600 yuan. Additionally, they can also provide a person’s bank balances at four major banks in China.

    Half an hour after the reporter paid 600 yuan and provided a colleague’s phone number to the service provider, he received the colleague’s location information — a map with longitude and latitude showing exactly where the colleague was.

    The reporter also paid the service provider 700 yuan for nine types of personal records since April 2011 of another colleague, including his flight records, bank accounts, driving license, traffic violation records and vehicle registration records.

    The colleague confirmed the accuracy of these records, saying that he had obtained a new ID card in April 2011, which might be the reason that these records only dated back to then.

    Many service providers use QQ, WeChat or third-party platforms to solicit customers and complete transactions, according to the report.

    An individual service provider, identified as Kai, said he uses zbj.com, a service crowd-sourcing website, as a cover to make deals with customers. He said that through the website customers can assign paid work to him under the label of software development or costume design, so that their payments will be secured by the website before he completes the work.

    According to the report, there used to be many “social worker banks” formed by hackers for stealing and collecting people’s personal information. Despite authorities’ crackdown on these illegal online groups, many hackers are still exchanging people’s privacy for money online.

    The reporter called the police in Guangzhou because his colleague, whose information was sold by the service provider, is a registered resident in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province. The police didn’t file the case because the victim’s information wasn’t made public, but the police promised they would deal with the service provider.

    A Tencent staffer said that an illegal multi-platform industry chain for selling people’s personal information has been formed, and so far the QQ security team has closed down over 4,500 QQ chat groups and banned 3,400 QQ accounts involved in personal information trading.

    (Zhang Yang)