Under the pretext of purchasing leaked data in bulk for marketing, we spoke to ‘Rakesh’ at length. And among other things, he said he’d done no wrong in creating the ProxyEarth.org website.
We published a report about a website called ProxyEarth.org that allows you to fetch the personal data (address, ID proof, alternate numbers, etc.) of Indians using only phone numbers.
While the website had not been blocked in India at the time of writing this, in the aftermath of our report, it began running at a reduced capacity, often with glitches. Nevertheless, we decided to dig deeper.
India Today Fact Check’s investigation led us to a man who identifies himself as Rakesh, one of the key persons behind ProxyEarth.org. While this might not be his real name, we will henceforth refer to him as such for convenience.
Under the pretext of purchasing leaked data in bulk for marketing, we spoke to Rakesh at length. And among other things, Rakesh said he had done no wrong in creating this website.
Who is ‘Rakesh’?
Rakesh has a fairly wide but anonymous presence online. But we managed to connect his many accounts thanks to a common element: his profile photo, which is an anime-style portrait of a young man wearing a plaid shirt and featuring the Indian flag and the logos of CapCut and Adobe After Effects.
We found Instagram, X, and YouTube accounts featuring the same photo. All of these accounts share more or less the same type of content: hacks for pirating premium video editing apps, sending bulk messages, temporary OTPs, live webcams, etc.
We were still looking for a face when we found the Threads account connected to his Instagram. It had a different profile photo — not exactly a real face, but something close. It appears to be a heavily edited version of a real person’s face, with the same After Effects logo in the back. We aren’t sure if this is actually Rakesh.
How we found him
Upon examining the source code (backend) of the website, we found mention of a Telegram channel called “@uploadfileofficial”. On that channel, we found the link to another Telegram channel called “@rakeshxofficial”.
On “@rakeshxofficial”, he identified himself as an editor and a programmer. Both channels had the same profile photos mentioned earlier.
‘I did nothing wrong’
While investigating the web of multiple social media accounts, websites, and Telegram channels, we found a phone number. We then called this number on the pretext of buying a package of leaked data.
Rakesh believed us and asked for details about the kind of data we wanted. During this conversation, he said that he worked with a team of 10–12 people, who had together created the ProxyEarth.org website. He said that this was only one of their many projects.
Rakesh also claimed that he was from Bihar, from a town bordering Eastern Uttar Pradesh. This matched with his number’s TrueCaller information.
Rakesh said that he was not doing anything wrong. He told us that he was not responsible for any of the data breaches — he was only using existing data leaks to power the website. He said that he had only merged multiple such databases for this website.
We found that whenever you enter a mobile number on the website, it initiates an API call to connect with leaked databases at the backend. As we mentioned in our previous story, there have been reports of several major leaks related to Indians in the last couple of years.
