Uttar Pradesh Police arrests 10 persons for making counterfeiting Aadhar cards, UIDAI security bypassed

The Uttar Police has claimed to have arrested 10 persons of a gang that was involved in counterfeiting Aadhar cards with help of agents on Monday.

Police have seized 38 fingerprints on paper, 46 fingerprints manufactured by chemicals, two Aadhaar finger-scanners, two finger-scanning devices, two iris retina scanners, eight rubber stamps, 18 Aadhaar cards, a webcam, GPS equipment, 11 laptops, 12 mobile phones  and a Polymer Curing Instrument.

The arrested have been identified as Saurabh Singh — kingpin of the gang, from Kanpur — Shubham Singh, Shobhit Sachan, Manoj Kumar, Tulsiram, Shivam Kumar, Kuldip Singh, Chaman Gupta, Guddu Gond and Satyendra Kumar.

The police have registered a case at the Cyber Crime police station, Lucknow, under the Indian Penal Code Sections 419, 420, 467, 468, 471, 474 and 34, Information Technology Act Sections 66 and 66C and Aadhaar Act Section 7/34.

A senior police officer part of the raiding team not authorised to talk the media said, “The arrest indicated a well-established network which has bypassed extensive security mechanisms set by the Unique Identification Authority of India or UIDAI.”

The officer added that raids were carried out after they have been receiving continuous leads from the last few months about a gang involved in making counterfeiting Aadhaar cards using tampered client applications.

He added, the mechanism used by the gang was complex. They had cloned fingerprints of UIDAI centre operators to log on to the Aadhaar website and simultaneously register fake enrolments

The senior police officer added that during the course of investigation and questioning of the arrest they have learnt that Information Security Policy mandated by the UIDAI was broken at many levels, including registrars, enrolment agencies, supervisors, verifiers and operators.

According to the officer, the arrested used to bypass the biometric norms of the UIDAI with fingerprint clones and then tamper with the source code of the UIDAI application client to create a fake application client.

He added that the arrested then would bypass the operator authentication process to create fake Aadhaar cards.

“Hackers would send the client application to unauthorised operators for a sum of ₹5, 000 each,” the officer said.