Staff stealing over 400000 users' information,company apologized

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A criminal gang colluding with staff of logistics company YTO Express to steal more than 400,000 pieces of users' information has sparked much discussion among internet users on Tuesday. As the volume of express delivery on the "Singles' Day" shopping festival has surged, privacy protection and information security in the express delivery industry have attracted more attention.

This criminal group stole personal information from the express waybills of YTO users by renting the company's employee accounts, and reselling layer-by-layer to different downstream criminals. 

According to police officers in Handan of North China's Hebei Province, this criminal group conspired by dividing tasks. They rented YTO's internal employee accounts at 500 yuan per day, entering the logistics system and exporting information of users' express waybills. After sorting, they resold the stolen information to regions with high incidence of telecom fraud in China and Southeast Asia through social network platforms like WeChat and QQ. 

The case involved suspects from Hebei, Henan, Shandong and other provinces, and the scam involved more than 1.2 million yuan.

According to informed sources, there are five YTO employees involved in this case. They were in five districts and counties of Handan. The information leakage included the addresses, names, and phone numbers of the senders and recipients.

An insider said about 45,000 recipients and senders' complete mailing information had been leaked. One of the suspects surname Ma, confessed that he sold the information at 1 yuan ($0.15) for each piece.

YTO apologized for this incident on Tuesday. Official statement shows the company closed the risk accounts when it found abnormal operations and reported to the police. The relevant suspects were detained in September. YTO said they will improve the information security risk control system, real-time monitoring of internal accounts and detection of illegal activities.

Many netizens said on Weibo that they would use nicknames as their recipient names when filling in delivery information, and cut out labels or erase key information with marker pens from packages after receiving parcels.

Source: globaltimes

Editor: Crystal H

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