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Were 1 billion Chinese citizens’ information stolen from the Shanghai police?
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A hacker is selling an alleged 1 billion Chinese citizens’ information stolen from Shanghai police.
& I downloaded the sample the hacker provided and called dozens of people listed. Nine picked up & confirmed exactly what the data said.
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The sample contains individuals’ personal names, national ID numbers, phone numbers, birthdays and birthplaces, as well as detailed summaries of crimes and incidents they had reported to the police.
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The cases range from incidents of petty theft and cyber fraud to reports of domestic violence, dating as far back as 1995 to as recently as 2019.
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At this point, it’s impossible to confirm the scale of the data leak, but five of the people who picked up verified all of the case details listed with their name — information that would would be difficult to obtain from any source other than the police.
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The other four confirmed basic information like their names before hanging up. One man, upon hearing why we had his information, sighed in resignation: “We are all running naked,” he said, using popular Chinese slang for a lack of privacy.
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If the hack indeed encompasses 1 billion people, it would be one of *largest* cybersecurity breaches ever recorded and the largest known for China. But experts remain cautious—the hacker’s claim could be exaggerated or falsified to boost financial gain.
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I was truly stunned when the first person picked up—I really believed the whole thing to be fake. By the third, I was shaking—both from the nerves of trying to explain why I had their extremely private information and the weight of realizing what this leak could mean for so many.
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There’s no way really to predict the consequences other than that the people affected will have to live with it pretty much forever. As
told me: “Trying to remove your information from the internet is like trying to remove pee from a pool.”
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weehingthong 
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