Indian police to query Google over 500,000 fake Gmail IDs linked to bomb hoax

India's burgeoning cybercrime causes losses running into more than $2 billion a year from financial scams, and its law enforcement has increasingly tackled technology platforms seen to have been exploited to enable such crimes.

The Gujarat investigation began after a bomb threat email received by the state government on September 10, days ahead of the recent New Delhi summit of the BRICS grouping.

It also threatened countries cooperating with India during the summit, police said in a statement.

The threats proved false, Bheda said, adding that one of those arrested was in contact with a buyer in Bangladesh who purchased batches of the accounts and paid partly in cryptocurrency to send the fake emails.

Also of concern to police, Bheda said, was the fact that each fraudulent account employed two-factor authentication, an extra security step Google offers to keep accounts safe.

How the criminal network managed to do this for such a large number of accounts is another angle of investigation.