The US government might buy it to help them find good candidates to recruit as spies and saboteurs, or to note if current spies and saboteurs are under suspicion or have been discovered.

If the records are digital and non-air-gapped in any system of any country, you can assume that the US government has access to those records already. The exceptions to this assumption are exceedingly rare.

As a US citizen I want to believe bravado like this but I’m guessing this is just your fantasy world talking not actual knowledge of the government being competent, which in my personal experience seems extremely unlikely.

The government isn't competent as a whole.. but the intelligence agencies are rather powerful. I've worked for DARPA and IARPA and you wouldn't believe half the stuff I could say publicly and none of the stuff I can't disclose.

Post the stuff you're able to talk about publicly, I'm interested!

They never will. It’s all nonsense bravado.

We're always told that grand "conspiracy theories" are impossible because if hundreds or thousands of people are involved someone will always leak something about it. Interesting there's all these people out there who seem to know much bigger things than Snowden revealed.

What can you say publicly?

They'd probably just buy it to have it. That much data about foreign citizens can be valuable in many ways, from immigration to foreign intelligence.

"Who would buy this?"

Foreign intelligence agencies for classic espionage. If you want to do blackmailing in china, such a DB would be a good start.

Otherwise, data brokers. Advertisement, financial credibility, trustworthines of buisness partners etc.

I don't know how it works in China but where I am a person's criminal record is not public but not exactly private either. In the sense that an employer can ask for your criminal record and you have the choice giving a printout of it or not having your job. Making it kind of hard to see how the knowledge of a criminal record could be used to blackmail someeone.

As for "data brokers. Advertisement, financial credibility, trustworthines of buisness partners etc.". Maybe. But these companies would turn themselves into criminals by using or purchasing this information.

It is likely, that this DB contains more information, than what a formal printout gives.

"But these companies would turn themselves into criminals by using or purchasing this information."

Which is why they probably would not deal with the information gathering directly, but use a service of a data analyst company. When they do something illegal, nobody who contracted then did ever know anything. I think this game is played in china as well.

rest assured that intelligence agencies have means of accessing police records in other nations.

this data is only interesting to the low end of data brokers, advertisers and other scammers, hence the rather low price.

China has foreign call scams just like the US.

making money is not the motive for some. this database will be very useful going forward. imagine the leverage you could have over business dealings.

some guys at the top of the game are probably already doing this and have figured out how to both insulate themselves and launder/hide data they horde.