By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
Police detained two employees of a subcontractor of GS Caltex and two of their friends, Sunday, for the alleged theft of personal information of more than 11 million customers of the oil refiner.
The four planned to sell the information to the highest bidder, according to police.
The personal information of the 11.19 million customers included resident registration numbers, home and company addresses, and phone numbers, in what is the country's largest-ever data theft case.
One of the subcontractor workers, Jeong, 28, was one of the 12 people authorized to access the database and is suspected of stealing the information between July and August. He asked another worker to make a simplified chart of the customer information and record it in Microsoft Excel files on compact discs (CDs), according to the police.
Afterward, two accomplices attempted to spread news of the theft, by pretending they found the CDs by chance; one of them contacted a newspaper company and said he had picked up the CDs at a garbage dump in a leisure district in southern, Seoul. Police will seek arrest warrants for three of the four.
``They tried to make the `leak' a social issue by reporting it to the media, as they would be able to sell the information later for a high price if the media reported that the CDs included the personal information of many customers, including high-profile figures,'' a police officer at the National Police Agency said.
Police, however, have found some inconsistencies in the testimony of the four and are continuing to question them over details of the crime, and are looking for other possible accomplices.
They found the suspects made five more copies of the CDs, with two of them currently being held by newspaper journalists. ``We are trying to collect the CDs as quickly as possible, because if the information is spread, its impact will be huge. We don't know yet whether other copies have already been sold,'' the officer said.
Police recommended that GS Caltex create a Web site so that customers can check on whether their information was stolen or not.
The CDs included information of high-profile figures including ministers, the police chief, the intelligence agency head, presidential secretaries and lawmakers.