Police say a criminal network amassed half a million Gmail accounts that were used to send bomb threats ahead of the BRICS Summit
India will question Google over a network of 513,847 Gmail accounts that were unearthed in a probe into recent bomb threats targeting government offices and countries that participated in the BRICS Summit in New Delhi.
Police in the western Indian state of Gujarat uncovered the database of email credentials from two people arrested over bomb threats to the state’s top lawmaking body, the Legislative Assembly, as well as the offices of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, and countries participating in the summit. Similar emails were also sent to ten schools and three courts in Gujarat.
Gujarat is the home state of both Modi and Shah. The threats were later found to be hoaxes.
Roshan Kumar Bhumihar, arrested from Bhagalpur in the eastern Bihar state, led the police to Gulshan Kumar Singh from Deoghar in neighboring Jharkhand state, who allegedly supplied the Gmail accounts used to send the threats out. Singh was also arrested, and the devices used to transmit the threats were seized.
Police say Singh had been generating email IDs in bulk since 2022 and supplying them as ready-to-use accounts. Investigators are surprised at how the large number of accounts were created and operated without getting caught in Google’s security systems.
“We will write to Google, ask them to make some policy changes so [safeguards] cannot be bypassed,” senior Gujarat Police cybercrime official Vivek Bheda said, according to local reports.
Police also plan to formally make Google a subject of the investigation, although it is unclear whether the US-based tech major will face any charges.
The Gmail accounts were allegedly created specifically for sending email threats as well as for carrying out other cybercrimes. The investigators allege the suspects shared the email accounts to associates in Bangladesh and received financial support from them.
One of the people arrested was also in contact with a buyer in Bangladesh who purchased batches of accounts and paid partly in cryptocurrency, Reuters reported.
