Indian police plan to demand answers from Google after uncovering a criminal network that operated more than half a million fake Gmail accounts, some of which were used to send false bomb threats to government offices, Reuters reported Tuesday.
Police in the western state of Gujarat dismantled the network this week and arrested two suspects. Investigators discovered 513,847 Gmail addresses and passwords that police say had been in use since 2022.
Vivek Bheda, a senior Gujarat Police cyber official, described the scale of the operation as unprecedented. He said authorities would formally contact Google and demand changes preventing criminal networks from bypassing its security systems.
Police also plan to formally include Google as a party being questioned in the investigation. It remains unclear whether the Alphabet-owned company could face charges or other penalties. Google did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
The investigation began after the Gujarat government received a bomb threat by email on September 10, days before the BRICS summit in New Delhi. The message also threatened countries that cooperated with India during the summit. Authorities later determined that the threats were false.
One of the arrested suspects was reportedly in contact with a buyer in Bangladesh who purchased batches of Gmail accounts and paid for them partly with cryptocurrency. The accounts were then used to send fraudulent emails.
Investigators were particularly troubled by the discovery that every fake account had two-step verification enabled, an additional security measure offered by Google. Police are now investigating how the network activated the feature on such an enormous number of accounts.
The case comes as Indian authorities conduct a broader examination of Google’s operations in the country. Officials are already investigating cases in which criminals used the company’s Firebase website-development platform to carry out financial scams.
Cybercrime and financial fraud cause more than $2 billion in losses annually in India, according to Reuters.
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