New Delhi: Indian police will question Google over alleged gaps in safeguards after uncovering a criminal network that created and managed more than 500,000 fake Gmail accounts to send hoax bomb threats to government offices, a senior police official.
Police in the western state of Gujarat this week arrested two people and uncovered 513,847 Gmail IDs and passwords that had allegedly been used since 2022 to send what authorities described as interstate bomb threats.
The investigation is the first reported case in which Google itself has emerged as a subject of the probe. Vivek Bheda, a senior cybercrime official with Gujarat police, said the scale of the fake accounts was unprecedented.
“We will write to Google, ask them to make some policy changes so (safeguards) cannot be bypassed,” Bheda told Reuters, adding that police planned to formally designate Google as a subject of the investigation soon.
Google, owned by Alphabet, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It was not immediately clear what legal charges or penalties, if any, the company could face. The investigation began after the Gujarat government received a bomb threat email on September 10, days before a recent New Delhi summit of the BRICS grouping.
The email also threatened countries cooperating with India during the summit, police said. The threats were later found to be false, Bheda said. One of the arrested suspects was allegedly in contact with a buyer in Bangladesh who purchased batches of the accounts and made partial payments in cryptocurrency to send the fake emails, according to police.
Authorities are also investigating how the network was able to create such a large number of fraudulent accounts with two-factor authentication enabled. The security feature is offered by Google as an additional layer of protection for accounts, making the apparent use of two-factor authentication across the fraudulent accounts a particular concern for investigators.
India’s expanding cybercrime problem causes losses of more than $2 billion a year through financial scams, while law enforcement agencies have increasingly focused on technology platforms that criminals allegedly exploit to facilitate such activities.
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