Apple Users Beware! Your Data is Being Sold.

The more you are addictive to technology the more it is harmful to you. If you are Apple user, you never know whether your data is safe or not. Recently Chinese authorities say they’ve broken up a massive black market operation in the country, where Apple users’ data was being illegally sold to buyers.

After months of investigation, local police say 22 people in the southern Zhejiang province have been detained on suspicion of infringing individuals’ privacy and illegally obtaining their digital personal information. After investigation police found around 20 suspects are employees of Apple distributors who allegedly used internal Apple systems to gather personal and contact details of Mac and iPhone users, which they sold as part of a scam totalling approximately $7.36 million. The police report doesn’t mention if the data stolen was of Chinese users or Apple customers around the world.

The criminals, who were outsourced to work for Apple, allegedly charged between $1.50 and $26.50 for the illegally gathered data. The police arrested suspects across four provinces over the weekend, seizing their tools and dismantling their network. Though selling personal user information has been fairly common in China, the country recently implemented a new law on June 1, to specifically tackle the issue and protect citizen’s privacy online.