A 21-year-old BCA student working as a call-centre executive at a reputable IT company's Sector V office was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly stealing information from the records of one of the firm's clients, a UK-based telecom company.

Mazharuddin Ahmed was picked up from his Topsia home. Police said names, phone numbers and other details of the telecom company's customers were found on a laptop and in multiple pendrives in his possession. The devices have been impounded.

Ahmed has been charged under IPC sections 408 (criminal breach of trust by a clerk) and 420 (cheating) and IT act sections 66D (cheating using a computer) and 72 (breach of confidentiality and privacy). If found guilty, he can be imprisoned up to seven years.

He was produced before a Salt Lake court on Tuesday and remanded in police custody for six days.

"The Indian company lodged a complaint on Monday after they had received a mail from the UK firm, alleging that someone was hacking into its records," said a senior officer of the Salt Lake cyber crime police station.

"Employees are barred from downloading anything from the office computers but Ahmed had accessed a chunk of data and stored it in the cloud. Later he downloaded the data on pendrives," said an investigator.

A spokesperson for the Indian company said on Tuesday night that he did not know about the arrest.

The police said the arrest might be linked with a probe headed by Scotland Yard into a cyber attack on the UK telecom company on October 21 last year in which the personal details of almost 1,57,000 of its customers had been accessed. Six persons have been arrested from different countries in connection with the attack.