, which was later published by Reuters, promised that the company could obtain “information that you imagine and also one that you didn’t imagine.” Some examples: “Get remote access to Email, Computers, Websites, devices which are not accessible. Collect confidential Information/Evidences and give your customers real satisfaction.”
Jain told Rey that he knew the real story of those leaks. Jain had worked for a time as a hacker for hire, doing business under the name Cyber Defence and Analytics. In December, 2015, Jain said, a private investigator on the Ras Al Khaimah team commissioned him to access Azima’s online accounts, and by April, 2016, a spear-phishing e-mail had duped Azima into turning over his iCloud password.
Rey told me that he warned Jain, “No real cop would want to meet you at 2 a.m. in the middle of nowhere. Get your ass on the first plane out of India.” Page now said that, before giving his false testimony, he had participated in a “mock trial” in Switzerland with others on the Ras Al Khaimah team to rehearse their bogus story and “perfect the narrative that we were to tell the English court.
Rey said that, judging from the data he has obtained from Jain and his hacker colleagues, the hacking-for-hire business in India is much bigger than most experts had imagined. “In addition to BellTroX and CyberRoot, there are about ten to fifteen other Indian companies doing this,” he told me. “We have seen close to a hundred and twenty thousand victims over the past ten years, so it really is an industry.