John Marsh 
Updated July 18th, 2019
If you are a Truecaller user, your might have a thing or two to worry about. Personal data of millions of Truecaller users, has been leaked online and it is available on sale on dark web, a part of the internet that is notorious for sale of illegal goods and information among other things.
According to an investigative report by the Economic Times, troves of personal data, which includes details such as the phone numbers and email addresses of the Truecaller users among other things, is available on sale on private internet forums and dark web. While the personal information of the mobile app’s global users is available for a price as high as 25,000 Euros , the personal data of Indian, which form 60-70 per cent of the mobile app’s user base of 140 milllion users, is on sale for about 2,000 Euros.
The Swedish cyber security firm, that discovered the breach first, has also found evidence of unauthorised copying of users’ personal information. ET, up on its own investigation found that the data available on sale also contains details pertaining to users’ state of residence and their mobile service provider apart from their personal identifiers.
The Swedish firm that has been investigating the matter for a long time has also found a very large percentage of data that does not belong to Truecaller.
Truecaller, however, has denied all reports of a data breach saying that the user data of all Truecaller users is safe and that there is no record of the sensitive user information, including the financial data being extracted from its database. For reference, Truecaller apart from serving as a global contact book also provides payments option in India via the Unified Payment Interface (UPI).
“We would like to reinforce that this was not an attack on our database, as data stored on our servers is highly secured. We take the privacy of our users and the integrity of our services, extremely seriously. As we investigate, we will continuously implement new protocols to prevent any future attempts,” a Truecaller spokesperson said in a statement to the publication.
