A US Judge in Minnesota has granted the Police a search warrant to direct Google to provide personal details about anyone searching for a specific name. What could be the cause?
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The Edna Police Department is investigating and chasing an unknown suspect responsible for a fraud wire transfer of $28,000. According to Tony Webster, the suspect used a fake passport of the victim using a public available photo of the victim to trick the bank which relied on a fax copy of the victims passport to verify the transaction.
The Edina Police during its investigations, found out that the fake passport of the victim was created using a public available photo when they searched for the victim's name on Google. The Police ruled out the possibility of Bing and Yahoo and believes the fake passport was obtained using Google search engine.
To more lights on the suspect, the Edina Police obtained a search warrant from a US judge directing Google to provide the names, email, IP address, Birth date, social security number, etc of any one who searched for the suggest four variants of the victim's name on Google between Dec 1, 2016 and January 7, 2017.
However, the warrant is limited to the city of Edina, County of Hennepin, State of Minnesota which is home to over 50,000 people.
The Reg in its post said a Google spokesman had told them that Google had declined to an administrative subpoena from the court.
"We aren't able to comment on specific cases, but we will always push back when we receive excessively broad requests for data about our users," Reg quoted the Google Spokes person.