About 91.5 billion yuan of economic losses were caused due to personal information leaks and fraud between the second half of 2015 and the first half of 2016, according to statistics.
On Dec. 5, police in Beijing handled a case involving the illegal sale of over one million pieces of personal information, including phone numbers.
Single pieces of information were being sold at prices from 50 cents to 100 cents.
According to a report on the protection of net users’ rights released by the Internet Society of China, in the first half of 2016, Chinese net users received an average of 20.6 spam messages and 21.3 crank calls every week.
A net user said he once searched the risks of low blood platelets levels via his browser, and hours later he received a phone call from a hospital asking him if he needed any effective medicine to prevent low platelets.
“I didn’t leave my phone number, so how did the hospital get it, or who sold it?”
Last year, a student who was just admitted into university in eastern China died after she was swindled out of her family’s tuition savings by a telecom scam.
According Baidu’s safety team, an estimated 40,000 websites are involved in personal information leaks, and 27 of the service platforms have illegally obtained over 5,000 phone numbers. Without effective measures, about 5 million users’ information will be stolen every day.
In a case handled by police in Ningbo in June, a person who had worked in the communication and real estate industries for years tried to sell 120 million pieces of personal information.
In June, China’s Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate released a judicial interpretation on infringement of personal information in criminal cases, defining the scope of personal information under the Criminal Law.
According to the document, illegally obtaining, selling, or providing 5,000 or more pieces of personal information are defined as “serious” circumstances in sentencing.
Many Chinese internet companies are using artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies to detect and combat the illegal business of obtaining personal information.
About 91.5 billion yuan of economic losses were caused due to personal information leaks and fraud between the second half of 2015 and the first half of 2016, according to statistics.
Last year, a student who was just admitted into university in eastern China died after she was swindled out of her family’s tuition savings by a telecom scam.
According to the document, illegally obtaining, selling, or providing 5,000 or more pieces of personal information are defined as “serious” circumstances in sentencing.
