My Birthday Promise (Editing)

Data broker

Dinesh

How could he do this to me?

I went through the Facebook profile of Mr. Anand Shikre. He was a 35 years old man who lived in our building. Hacking his Facebook profile and email accounts was never in my plans but what happened yesterday made me change my plans.

I was introduced to Mr. Shikre a couple of years ago by a friend. He was a college professor by profession. After we met, we ran into each other couple of times in the lift or in the lobby, or in the street. We would stop and chat a little bit. Nothing much, just little pleasantries. He's a nice guy. Then after a while I noticed there were no more stopping, just saying hello and continuing on our way. And then the verbal hellos stopped and then we went into these little sorts of nods of recognition. So fine, I figured, that's where this relationship is finally going to settle. Polite nodding. I was fine with it. Few days later I met him again and he didn't nod- like I didn't exist. He went from nods to nothing. And now there was this intense animosity whenever he passed. It was like he really hated me and, surprisingly, it was based on nothing.

I tracked his recent online activities but there wasn't any recent incident in his life which could explain his sudden intense animosity towards me.

There got to be something!

The sound of ringing phone broke my concentration. I pulled out the phone from my pocket and checked the number.

US?

I was startled to see the incoming call from US. I knew nobody in US.

Who could it be?

I thought for a while wondering about who it was before realizing it was better to answer the call and find out the details of the caller.

"Hello," I answered the call.

My eyebrows jerked up in surprise when I heard the familiar voice from the other end.

******

It was my fifth assignment as a data broker since I opened my own data-brokering firm a few month ago. I used to work part time without the knowledge of any of my friends. It was a viable source of income for me. There's a whole industry full of companies who make their money by selling people's personal information. I was just an entrant in this $100 billion-a-year industry which was growing by leaps and bounds over the past couple of years. These were the companies you've never heard of but they've heard a lot about you. These companies knew your name, your phone number, where you live, your spending habits and, in many cases, what you are interested in buying -- sometimes even before you do.

My first assignment was to hack the Facebook and email account of this girl named Swati Vyas. She was the wife of my client. The deal was simple. He wanted the information and I wanted the money. No question asked. But I knew he wanted the information because he believed she was having an affair with another man. I hacked her accounts and gave the passwords to my client. Next assignment was to collect the call record history and credit card statements of Mr. Anil Juneja for past two months. My client didn't reveal her identity. But it wasn't hard for me to find out that she was his wife.

My first two assignments were a piece of cake. The third assignment was not as easy as it looked like at first. Preeti was one of the smartest people I tried to hack the account of. Hacking can be very easy, or it can be quite difficult, depending on whom your target is. Preeti was different from the most of the people. It took me one week and a bit of effort to access her email account and Facebook account.

Hacking online accounts usually required me to guess the target's password. Mostly people used their personal information such as where they lived or their pet's name or street they lived in or girlfriend's/boyfriend's name or school name or date of birth or combination of these to set their password. First trick was to know the person and then guessing the password he or she could choose. For most of the cases I simply searched about them on the internet and guessed their password. I had this thing for guessing the passwords of the people with an accuracy of over 90%. Once I get into their email account, it was easy for me to get to other services they had like their online banking accounts.

If they were smart people like Preeti then the best way to access their account was by social engineering. I was unable to guess Preeti's password and I knew sites like Gmail and Hotmail will block me out after five or so invalid login attempts. It was best for me to reset her password and gather all the information before she could find out that her account was hacked. For resetting her Gmail account password, I needed to know the secrete questions on her account which were "what is your mother's maiden name?" and "what was the first street you lived in?" As all her social networking profiles were protected, the best way for me to find this out was by talking to her and getting the information I needed from her in the process.

So I joined TGIF where she worked. I befriended her and we soon started dating. I started our first date by telling her about my fake family and then I steered the conversion to her family history and got the name of parents. Now I had her mother's maiden name. I did the same for the other secret questions but I was careful enough to not let her sense my true intention. Amidst of all this she revealed that she had started falling for me. I reciprocated as I still needed more information from her. And later when I was wondering how to get rid of her Aman and Alisha came as a blessing to TGIF that day and did the job for me.

The only problem I faced during these assignments was my encounter with my friends; amongst all I feared Alisha the most. Although others were convinced I was Dave, she was never convinced. I encountered Alisha again at the movie theatre where she and Mohit came to see the movie. I was following up on Mr. Sachin Gautam. I hacked the account of his girlfriend and found out he was going to movie with her. So I followed him to the theatre. I gave the guy at the counter 2000 bucks and replaced him. I quickly scanned and took a picture of Mr. Sachin's credit card when he used it to pay for the burgers and nachos.

I was a little apprehensive about my new assignment. When Rutt told me she wanted to know everything about Alisha I straight away said 'No' to her. I had this rule -'Don't hack the accounts of friends and their girlfriends or boyfriends'. When to break this rule was another rule. I wouldn't have agreed to her if she wouldn't have offered me money which reminded me of another rule -'Customer first'. This rule obviously superseded the previous rule. I prepared a contract and emailed her the copy which she read, accepted, and signed digitally.

As per contract Rutt, being a client, had the privilege to not divulge why she wanted the information on the subject but she choose oppositely. She briefed me on why she needed the history of Alisha. She had this feeling that Alisha and Mohit had something going on in between them. When she told me "May be they are screwing each other behind my back" I couldn't believe my ears. I was confident there was nothing going on between Mohit and Alisha and invading Alisha's privacy was futile but I had to work as per the interest of my clients. What to say client satisfaction was one of the major focuses of my company.

Rutt's whole idea of Alisha and Mohit being together was based on the statement I made at the party. To be honest I didn't even remember I said that. I said too many things to too many people just for the sake of socializing. I was an introvert by nature. I used to say random stuff to people to prevent coming across as a socially awkward person, and more importantly to prevent myself from crossing over into the realm of hermitdom. I was a modern-day-hermit who enjoyed his time sitting in front of the laptop and peeing into the life of others. I am a hacker.

I opened my laptop and booted it. I wasn't surprised to notice that my current as well as past assignment was based on trust issues or on infidelity. I was happy I was single. I smiled to myself, opened my browser, and typed Alisha Pareekh on Google search before hitting the enter key.

******

A/N:

Hello guys!

Congratulations on reading another chapter of MBP! :P

I start every chapter with the intention of wrapping up the story fast but sadly I always end up writing more than what I have in mind. New ideas keep rolling in as I write and I keep adding them up and thus I convert one chapter into two chapters. Strange, huh? And this thing goes on and on.

I wanted to tell the story in under 20 chapters, but here I am on 28th chapter with few more to come.

I would really like to know your views on the pace of the story. Is it slow or is it okay?

Thanks for reading through!

Veer