CALLAB – Trading Personal Information by Alexander Gornyi

The post was originally published in Russian on Startup of the Day. Alexander kindly agreed to republish what we think is of great value to our readers.

We already wrote about several startups that trade personal data, but none of them have ever done it si directly as CALLAB, the Russian startup of the day.

The startup is  merely a Telegram bot. You enter the name of a celebrity and get their personal phone number, email, messenger contacts. There’s an option to search by tags instead of names – such as ‘politicians’ or ‘musicians,’ for example. The free version shows asterixes instead of number, the actual numbers cost about RUR 500 per card.

To be able to use the service for free, one can actively invite friends or share interesting contacts from one’s own library – but not just any, they have to be actually valuable, the admins check them manually.

The library is quite small for now, only a couple hundred people.They don’t include Putin, Navalny or Durov, but they do include such Russian celebrities as Pavel Bure, Monetochka, Tatyana Navka, Arkadiy Volozh and Ilya Yashin. And even yours humbly! That’s how I verified the library: it has my old phone number, but it does redirect to the new one and I would pick up the phone, so we can consider it working.

Whether or not Telegram will block it and how soon – difficult to say.

http://t.me/calllab_bot

#selffunded #Russia #personalinformation

Translation: Kostiantyn Tupikov