Belagavi Property Tax Portal Exposes Citizens’ Data, Leaving Them Vulnerable to Scammers

By Jayesh

Who doesn’t appreciate the convenience of paying bills and taxes online? Digital portals that offer such services are a real boon for all of us. But what if I told you that one of these portals, used for paying property taxes to the City Corporation of Belagavi, is carelessly exposing citizens’ personal information on the open web? How would you feel?

Unfortunately, this is exactly what’s happening. The portal we rely on for property tax payments publicly displays sensitive details like names, email addresses, and mobile numbers of users who pay their taxes online. Worse, the Property Identification Number (PID) assigned to each property is a sequential number. This means anyone with basic technical skills can easily write a script to automatically enter these numbers in sequence and extract personal details for every single property owner. In just a short amount of time, a scammer could collect an entire database of citizens’ personal information, amplifying the risk for all of us. This is prime material for scammers. With this information in hand, they wouldn’t hesitate to exploit it.

Armed with your property details, email, and mobile number, scammers can easily create a convincing narrative to deceive you. They’ll know your property size, when you last paid your taxes, and what’s due, and can easily pose as corporation staff. All it would take is a well-crafted email or SMS with this data, along with a fake payment link to a scammer’s UPI ID, and you could become an easy target.

Sadly, this isn’t just happening in Belagavi. The same issue exists with other city corporations across Karnataka, a state known for housing some of the world’s leading software export companies.

The problem doesn’t end with privacy breaches. There are additional concerns about the functionality of the software itself. For instance, the property tax calculations generated by the software often don’t match the manual calculations performed by the corporation staff. Even worse, the staff have admitted that the software is glitchy and that they have no way to fix or manage it. There’s also no clear redressal mechanism in place for citizens who have been overcharged due to these miscalculations.

As citizens, we’ve long been voicing our frustrations over the lack of attention to basic civic amenities. Now, as we move deeper into the digital age, we need to extend our concerns to the digital infrastructure as well. The indifference shown by the authorities in the physical world seems to have carried over into the digital one.

Jayesh is a Project Lead in a Leading MNC and is Passionate about developing, managing and implementing projects and holds expertise in building products from scratch as well as migrating legacy code to open-source platforms.

Disclaimer:
The information in this report has been provided by Jayesh, an expert in digital project management and open-source platforms. We have not independently verified the claims made regarding data exposure or the functionality of the property tax portal. Readers are advised to exercise caution and conduct their research before taking any action based on this report.