Indian Call Center Employees Hack US Bank Accounts

The Ascended One writes "Call center employees working for an Indian software company, MSource, supposedly used confidential client information to transfer client funds to themselves. The alleged perpetrators used the personal information of four NY-based clients to transfer ~$350,000 (Rs. 1.5 crores) in their names, a large sum in Indian currency. They were caught after the victims alerted the bank officials in the US, who then traced the crime to the Indian city of Pune. While the name of the bank has not been revealed, the article indicates that the bank in question is Citibank."

Comments

Easier to track

[Odo]

A lot of posts here will no doubt be saying something along the lines "see, this is what happens when you outsource". Well, think about it from an investigator's point of view. If money was transferred illegitimately from a US customer to somewhere in the US, it would be much harder to figure out what was going on than if it was being sent to India. By outsourcing the call center to India, it has made the origin of this sort of fraud much easier to detect.

I'm a system administrator and most of my customers are in the UK. So when I'm investigating an incident on our servers, and the logs show some activity from Brazil, it makes my job a lot easier.

Re:Easier to track

[Anonymous Coward]

I drove across the USA once at a very high rate of speed stopping only for gas & cola and paying by credit card. My credit card company froze my account for the numerous charges across multiple states in such a short time.

Re:Easier to track

[jcr]

I think it's worth pointing out that they were apparently caught in the act, so it's not like Citibank was standing by idly and not noticing.

I'd rather have my money in a bank that's recently had such an incident and caught the perps, than one that's still oblivious to the hazard.

-jcr

Re:Easier to track

[mister_jpeg]

yeah! and another good thing about outsourcing is that the dollar goes so much further in countries like India, so the criminals need to steal less! Why, I bet if Citibank hadn't outsourced that call center and the theft had occured in New York or somewhere, it woulda been a couple million!

</idiot mode>

Re:Easier to track

[Detritus]

The problem is jurisdiction. It's a lot simpler to investigate and prosecute crimes when they happen within a single country. Police detectives can obtain warrants and subpoenas from a local judge. They don't have to deal with the State Department, another country's foreign ministry, and prosecutors and police who have their own priorities and may not care if some local boys rip off some foreigners. Extradition, even when there are treaties in place, is relatively rare. It is usually reserved for the most serious crimes, like first-degree murder. Many countries will not extradite their own citizens, as a matter of policy.

Re:Easier to track

[knomevol]

I was going to say, "First our jobs, now our money" and something rather graphical - but since you explain it like that! 8P

Re:Easier to track

[Alioth]

Extradition, even when there are treaties in place, is relatively rare. It is usually reserved for the most serious crimes, like first-degree murder.

Don't forget music piracy!

Re:Easier to track

[TTL0]

I work in InfoSec and did a consulting project for a company that sells software (for clearing checks) to a lot of major banks. I was amazed how insecure banks realy are ! however the banks rely on thier ability to audit all transactions more than secure policys and procedures. So to sum up, it is easy to steal from banks it is hard not to get caught.

Re:Easier to track

[csjavi]

I think it's worth pointing out that they were apparently caught in the act, so it's not like Citibank was standing by idly and not noticing.

Did you RTFA which says:
The customers, from whose accounts the money had been withdrawn, alerted the bank officials in the US, after which the crime was traced to Pune.

So, the bank didn't notice anything, the customers did.

Re:Easier to track

[weave]

True, since the crime had to have happened in India, it narrows the list of possible suspects down to only a billion people.

Re:Easier to track

[fenris_23]

..sounds like we have another job for the dog. :-P

Re:Easier to track

[Jace of Fuse!]

I'd rather have my money in a bank that's recently had such an incident and caught the perps, than one that's still oblivious to the hazard.

Which is why they staged the whole thing. fnord

Re:Easier to track

[dmarx]

Extradition, even when there are treaties in place, is relatively rare. It is usually reserved for the most serious crimes, like first-degree murder.

Wire fraud is not a serious crime?

Re:Easier to track

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot. The fact that Citibank is the target of phishing and email scams has nothing to do with the operation of Citibank but is more due to the fact that they have such a large customer base.

I'm pretty confident that Citibank will survive without your allowance money.

Re:Easier to track

[poena.dare]

Having money stolen by contractors I can understand... but when MY stolen money is used to buy incense, sarongs, and Dharma & Greg DVDs - well, that's just plain unAmerican!

Re:Easier to track

[AndroidCat]

And the aliens won't be too happy about it either!

Re:Easier to track

[duffbeer703]

That is without a doubt one of the stupidest comments that I've ever heard in my life. Its not difficult to open accounts in the US anyway, particularly since there is a huge expatriate community in the US.

Big Indian outsourcing companies have a vested interest in keeping stuff like this out of the limelight -- notice that Citibank detected this fraud and not the outsourcer.

I really have no desire for my income tax, banking or medical processing to be handled in a country 8000 miles away that is completely outside of the framework of laws that protect my information in my country.

Re:Easier to track

[quarkscat]

I totally agree with your argument, but I would
take it a couple of steps further. Since $1 USD
goes so much further in India, instead of just
off-shore out-sourcing the "worker-bee" jobs there,
we really should be moving the corporate officers
and board of directors jobs there.

Just think, instead of a "Bernie Ebbers" who cooks
the books to the tune of $11 Billion USD in order
to keep that quarterly profit/quarterly bonus pyramid
scheme going at MCI/WorldCom, or a "Fiorina" that
has to be bribed $45 Million USD to leave HP,
the major shareholders could be looking at an
immediate 80% cut in pay and bonuses to their
corporate leadership by moving those jobs off-shore.

It isn't as if these US corporations wouldn't
directly benefit from hiring the top 1% of
Indian corporate officers, instead of the ethically
challenged USA-trained MBAs that we have now.

Re:Easier to track

[MysteriousPreacher]

Not really. If you consider the increase of fraud in China's banks as an example, you can see it two ways.

Either, fraud is increasing or investigators are becoming more dilligent and so, more fraud is coming to light.

My email account has spoofed by spammers. This doesnt' make me any less reliable. Citibank can't really help it if people chose to use their name in fraud. If, on the other hand, Citibank ignore the problem and take no action, then there is a case for them to answer.

Re:Easier to track

[IdleTime]

Wire fraud is not a serious crime?

No, it's only in USA that financial crimes are considered equal to murder. Other countries consider financial crimes to be of a more petty nature and punishments for crimes are lower.

Re:Easier to track

[AviLazar]

How is this easier? Money transferred from one bank account to another bank account is more easily traced within US. Our banks must follow strict guidelines, banks in other countries many nto have those same guidelines. If they transfered this money to say a Swiss bank account that didn't have any personal information attached to it - the police may never have caught a person. They might have been able to get to the account, and retrieve the money, butgettin a persons private info is much harder.

So when your logs show activity in Brazil, how is this easier then if your logs show activity in Maine?

Re:Easier to track

[ThomaMelas]

Their physical security isn't much better. Alot of them are using time lapse systems that have the cameras running through a switcher before the time lapse VCR.

Re:Easier to track

[justthisdude]

I agree: think about the Great wall of China, which was not built to keep invaders out but to slow their escape with swag in tow. Most crimes are not deterred because they are impossible, but because you can't get away with the loot. I just hope they publish this arrest widely in the call centers. Next time you talk to "Suzy" from Citibank about your account, be sure to mention these arrests.

Of course, how long until Indian criminals wise up and use offshore banking?

Re:Easier to track

[Reaperducer]

it's only in USA that financial crimes are considered equal to murder.

Really? Care to provide proof of a case where someone was sentenced to death for a financial crime? Or are you just practicing your anti-American troll?

Re:Easier to track

[w00f]

I work for a major Fortune 500 financial institution as a security architect, more specifically in the web appliation space... and you wouldn't believe the things I see. The ability to make money **always** trumps security's requirements, and what's sad is - this could all be prevented. I'll never advocate that we can resolve all identity theft (although we are sure as hell trying), now will try and tell people that it's even possible - but pushing security and balancing that with acceptable business risk is essential to the survival of many institutions in the financial world. Striking a balance; however, is often like Jedi vs. Sith... the balance swings when bad things happen.

Re:Easier to track

[Daedala]

Banks are not relying on their ability to audit all transactions. They are relying on _your_ ability to audit your transactions. Big difference. Balance your checkbook.

Re:Easier to track

[freedom_india]

I agree.

The auditing of banks in usual and the way they track their transactions make it very hard to steal from them anonymously.

Banks get very, very upset when they find that people can rip them off anonymously.

Citibank is more popular than most. As far as seccurity is conccerned, citibank is more secure than most banks i know.

Re:Easier to track

[Buran]

They got caught because the people who were stolen from yelled at the bank and demanded refunds ... the same way I've had to yell at my bank (not Citibank) until I finally (after weeks) got refunded in full for fraudulent charges on my credit card.

What upsets me is that the three companies who illegally charged my card took a day or so each to do it and I had to wait multiple weeks to get credited back (and to get my name removed from the fake website one company put up using my funds).

Quick to steal, slow to pay the restitution. Pathetic. And they wouldn't have done anything at all to pay me back, I suspect, if I hadn't started leaning on them. Heavily.

Re:Easier to track

[timeOday]

This will certainly happen - but what if the revenge against fat cats isn't so sweet after all? Sure it's ridiculous that Nike buys Chinese shoes for $12 and sells them for $120, but will we really be better off buying those same shoes rebranded for $30 at WalMart, if $25 of that $30 shoots straight out of the country?

Re:Easier to track

[Muhammar]

In this case, the banks also heavily relied on the perpetrators. These guys were actualy withdrawing money from the recipient account using their own names on personal checks! And they started spending like crazy on luxury cars. This is as clever as a dougnut shop robbery.

Re:Easier to track

[TheSync]

another good thing about outsourcing is that the dollar goes so much further in countries like India, so the criminals need to steal less!

I'm not sure that was only funny - it may also be relevant!

Re:Easier to track

[Serveert]

Wow that's some pretty good spin. Tom DeLay would be interested in your services!

Re:Easier to track

[quintinie]

I'd rather have my money in a bank that's recently had such an incident and caught the perps, than one that's still oblivious to the hazard.

Remember Garp

Re:Easier to track

[QMO]

It is not really worth pointing out something that is a false generality.

If you think that the incentive to steal is more for poor people, you haven't been paying attention. Thieves exist among all income brackets.

One of Parkinson's laws is something like, "Expenses always rise to meet income." This means that how tight your budget is doesn't depend on how much money you have/make.

Spending habits cause money problems much more often than income level does. This is not only my personal experience, but expert advice from people that do real financial counseling (as opposed to people that sell financial products).

Re:Easier to track

[graywolf001]

Wrong! Its is also just as much of a tautalogy to expect a virus/malware/spyware written specifically for Windows to statistically have a far greater chance of success than one written for any other OS. [Taking "success" to be "number of systems affected".]

Hence thats a very good analogy!!

Re:Easier to track

[pod]

It's like the project management axiom: work expands to fill all available time. Well, expenses expand to eat up all available income, and then some. Like PM can reign in out of control projects, so can people with their spending, but you are always fighting the trend.

You start making more money, or come into money, and suddenly you find all kinds of things to spend it on. Nicer more upscale things (car, home, clothes, electronics, food, entertainment, etc), you find yourself eating out more often, at more expensive places, take the taxi more often where you used to route yourself along transit lines before, etc etc. Yes, you don't have to do it, but it is against all we as humans instinctively know to do. So if you think your financial troubles will be over if you win that million, think again. Odds are against you. If you have bad spending habits now, they won't improve when you have more money.

Re:Easier to track

[rk]

Short answer: Yes.

Put another way, what do you think happens with US dollars that leave the country? Do you think they just get it all in cash, fill a pool with it and dive in a la Scrooge McDuck?

The time to worry is when foreign firms and people don't want any US dollars for their goods and services. If you've been watching the dollar, well... you can draw your own conclusions.

Re:Easier to track

[RoundSparrow]

ure it's ridiculous that Nike buys Chinese shoes for $12 and sells them for $120, but will we really be better off buying those same shoes rebranded for $30 at WalMart, if $25 of that $30 shoots straight out of the country?

Yes - because we are just stupid to pay for image / marketing like we do. This is the USA's downfall.. we are so good at manipulating people's minds into wanting to have stuff that we can ask almost any price. This is why people HATE us, we never draw the line on marketing... it is an endless frontier.

Example: Paying for movie tickets, and product placement, and advertisements at start, what next? Product placement has a long way to go I think.

Re:Easier to track

[Anonymous Coward]

So true. Back in the early 1990s I worked for HP Test & Measurement (which mades test equipment that is now known as Agilent). My fellow AE who specialized in telecom/datacom test equipment came back from pre-sales demo at Wells Fargo Bank at their main IT center in San Francisco. Apparently HP wasn't going to get any business from them anytime soon: the demo didn't go well. My buddy thought he was showing them something that could help them debug and harden their Automated Teller Machine network.

Basically he hooked up a T1/T3 analyzer to one of their main trunks and started showing how you can split out and split in datastreams to check things like per-channel BER and stuff. Then he hooked up a datacom analyzer to one of the split out channels that had modem traffic on it (which you could see on the T1/T3 analyzer). One of the useful features of the datacom box was a modem which would dump the decode modem traffic on a phone channel into ascii and pump it on the the datacom's screen. So they started watching the data traffic in real time.

Pretty quickly it became apparent that he had picked up an ATM transaction. It also become apparent that the entire transaction including account numbers, names, pins and transaction commands were being transmitted 100% in cleartext ascii over modem! The Well Fargo IT manager saw this too and, wait for it, he kicked out the HP Sales Rep and AE yelling and screaming how never wanted to see any HP test equipment enter a Wells Fargo facility ever again or hear that HP was talking to Wells Fargo IT employees about telecom or datacom products ever again.

Gee, security through obscurity. Needless to say, probably (?) most banks are using at least SSL or SSH by now, but for a measly $20K (in 1990 dollars, far cheaper today) in off-the-shelf equipment you could trivially do a man-in-the-middle replay attack just be putting some cones down and wearing a hardhat and hooking up to one of those telephone boxes outside the bank! And what audit trail other than your word some poor slob have against an "obvious secure" ATM transaction? None really.

This is absolutely true, unfortunately.

Re:Easier to track

[IdleTime]

I didn't know that we had mandatory death sentence for murder. Is that new?

Depending on the type of killing, you can get anywhere from 5 years to many lifetimes or even death penalty for a killing. You can easily rack up a sentence comparable to life for financial crimes, so I guess the only one out trolling is you.

Re:Easier to track

[mister_jpeg]

it was just a reaction to the parent.

I can't believe a professional sysadmin would think that the country in which a crime took place would appear in logs, let alone be useful in solving this kind of crime. It's just naivete of the sort that would .....lead one to believe that criminals would steal less if the US dollar went further in the criminals' country.

...so.... yeah. relevant, eh?

Re:Easier to track

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think they would have changed their systems? These technologies existed and weren't used then; they are absolutely not using SSL or SSH now. 'Security' is 'achieved' by limiting physical access and only by limiting physical access. "It ain't broke, why fix it?"

Re:Easier to track

[2old2rockNroll]

Of course, how long until Indian criminals wise up and use offshore banking?

You mean like the Bank of America?

Re:Easier to track

[timeOday]

Example: Paying for movie tickets, and product placement, and advertisements at start, what next? How about paying fandango.com, plus watching their banner ads, for the privelige of paying for the movie tickets?

Re:Easier to track

[dmarx]

Just because something's not equal to murder doesn't mean it's not a serious crime. These people did something that could have resulted in the loss of millions of dollars. They deserve to be punished for that. Or maybe demanding that theives be punished is simply my American arrogance.

Re:Easier to track

[RKloti]

If they transfered this money to say a Swiss bank account that didn't have any personal information attached to it - the police may never have caught a person. They might have been able to get to the account, and retrieve the money, butgettin a persons private info is much harder.

All Swiss banks have information attached to them. Try opening a bank account in Switzerland - you have to identify yourself first. Bank secrecy simply means that the bank may not disclose that information to anybody - even the government. Bank secrecy can be lifted in cases of criminal prosecution (which includes tax fraud, but not tax evasion, which is not a crime in Switzerland) but is otherwise sacrosanct. There are limitations, especially as pertaining to foreign nationals. But even if a foreign government demands information (the US government does, for example) on its nationals living abroad, no bank in Switzerland may yield this information without written permission from the affected person(s).

As for anonymous "numbered" bank accounts: They don't exist. They were abolished some time ago because of the problems that they caused.

Re:Easier to track

[TheLink]

Uh. When I was handing Sniffer (Network General/McAfee) products in those days (was in a company that was a dealer/reseller in the 90s), it's nearly a policy to NEVER attach a sniffer to a customer's network for demo (e.g. presales demo).

NEVER do that. Because:

1) If you see confidential data, stuff hits the fan. You can't "unsee" secrets.
2) If you find problems,
2.1) the prospect often wants to you to help fix it for free - and it's _presales_.
2.2) the prospect often gets distracted from the sales.

Someone should have told your buddy this stuff. It was in the Sniffer presales training or something. Looks like the HP training was different? ;)

If you explain 1) to the prospect as why you are doing analysis on canned data they are usually quite understanding. Often that's one thing they learn from the presales - "you mean pop3, emails etc all can be seen?". Well that was in the days where switches weren't as common...

Heh. Well your buddy's story is a good anecdote to use if someone needs to explain 1) to a prospect... Hehe.

Re:Easier to track

[Reaperducer]

I didn't know that we had mandatory death sentence for murder. Is that new?

No, it's not new at all. Perhaps it's just new to you. It depends on which state you live in. Perhaps you should be more informed about more than your own backyard before you go out trolling.

Re:Easier to track

[Justice8096]

You also won't be able to use the "you didn't pay your income taxes" (a la Al Capone) threat on a foreign worker.

Re:Easier to track

[julioody]

If we are talking about people who have legitimate access to a database which contains banking info, and by some bizarre reason think "hey, let's do some transfers! they'll never find out!", then it doesn't matter where the transaction is coming from. These guys are probably not even techies...
Now if you deal with pros, well, that's a different story. You cannot (real) IP numbers simply popping up in your web server logs. At least not from my experience.
And speaking of Brazil (I'm brazilian), I don't think your job would be easier. In fact, it's *very* likely that the network provider wouldn't keep track of the connections, you would have to overcome a language barrier, and after a few months, you would probably give up on trying to get any data.

Re:Easier to track

[AviLazar]

Abolished in Switzerland maybe, but not abolished everyone. There are countries who could care less. And there are banks in more unsavory goverment ruled countries that will house your money anonymously - especially if you are the more affluant clientelle.

Attention Citibank Customer

[DarkHelmet]

Attention Citibank Customer!

We are sorry to inform you, but your account information has fallen into the hands of employees at an Indian Call center we do work with. Unfortunately, your account may be compromised.

To protect your account, please log into our panel using the link below to change your username and password:

http://www.citibank.com/

Thank you for choosing Citi.

Re:Attention Citibank Customer

[DarkHelmet]

Okay, to add to the prank, I just created an fake-phishing site:

http://64.182.120.114/citibank/

Try putting in any bogus information into the username / password field.. You'll be redirected (via javascript, nothing posts), to a page with big yellow lettering saying "YOU MORON!"

I thought the "Protect yourself from identity theft" blurb on the page was classic.

This will all be part of a new site I'm going to make called:

http://www.hahathatswhatyouget.com

I just got the site, so it'll take a little bit for DNS to resolve :)

Feel free to try and fool people with this URL. I'll try submitting the link to slashdot in a few days for shits and giggles.

Re:Attention Citibank Customer

[ImaLamer]

Feel free to try and fool people with this URL. I'll try submitting the link to slashdot in a few days for shits and giggles.

Yeah! Meanwhile a million people try the form with their real usernames and passwords and you make a fortune.

I'd be very careful.

Re:Attention Citibank Customer

[DjBubze]

"If the URL starts with an http:/// and not https:/// that means that your connection is secure. Always try and log into bank accounts with https:/// if possible"

You might want to say... "If the URL starts with an http:/// and not https:/// that means that your connection is insecure."

Re:Attention Citibank Customer

[DarkHelmet]

Check the source of the page.

document.location = "moron.htm"

It DOES NOT do a post to anywhere, and therefore I can't collect any info.

Re:Attention Citibank Customer

[DarkHelmet]

Cool, changed it. Thanks man.

Re:Attention Citibank Customer

[roman_mir]

Attention Citibank Customer!

We are sorry to inform you, but your account information has fallen into the hands of employees at an Indian Call center we do work with. Unfortunately, your account may be compromised.

To get further information about protecting your account, please contact our Indian Call Center.

http://www.citibank.com/

Thank you for choosing Citi.

Re:Attention Citibank Customer

[karnal]

Make it more realistic (I just used you=un, moron=pw).

I tried to tap enter after putting in the user/PW pair, but it doesn't "log you in" then... :)

Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[Dancin_Santa]

It doesn't matter where people are located. What matters is that you have trustworthy people handling your business. And, you know what? Untrustworthy people are everywhere.

I, for one, do not buy into this Lou Dobbs racist/nationalist claptrap that says that we can't trust foreigners. I'm one of the biggest foreigners around, if you consider all the places I have to travel to that I'm not actually a citizen of.

Hey, bad people are in India. And in the U.S. And in Europe. And in Asia. Oh my god! They are everywhere!

Luckily, the bad people are outnumbered by the good. I can just take a look at my lists and figure that one out.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[JaredOfEuropa]

It doesn't matter where people are located. What matters is that you have trustworthy people handling your business. And, you know what? Untrustworthy people are everywhere.

If your employees are proud to be part of the firm, and if you treat them with respect and pay a decent wage, they are less likely to turn to fraud. However, if you treat them like shit and pay peanuts, they are more likely to become disgruntled and commit fraud or (digital) vandalism. Yes, just like in 'Office space'.

The current relentless drive to reduce employee costs to a minimum does not help in that respect, in any country. From what I understand, Indians are currently happy with their current wages (and often very odd working hours). But what will happen when the squeeze from even cheaper Chinese workers is on?

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[terminal.dk]

I agree to saome degree. It doesn't matter if the employees are yellow, red, green or black.

Most/all people are for sale if the price is right. And for people in India, the sum is maybe 1/100th or 1/10th of what it is in the USA. So by outsourcing to a country with low living standards, you can expect more crime because more are tempted.

I have also seen this in a company I worked in. Too much money - and people was tempted.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[WIAKywbfatw]

On the other hand, you don't have to be poor to be so consumed by greed that you're willing to steal or commit fraud to further line your pockets. Just look at Enron, Worldcom, etc if you want proof of that.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[JaredOfEuropa]

It doesn't matter if the employees are yellow, red, green or black.

Wait a minute.... green employees? Where the heck does your company outsource to?!

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[leuk_he]

In this case they transfered the money to their own bank acount. That is not a very good way to get the money since it very tracable.

Luckily, the bad people are outnumbered by the good.

might i add:
Luckily the the smart bad people are outnumbered by the dumb bad people. 8)

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[Alioth]

I'm one of the biggest foreigners around...

May I suggest you lay off the Big Macs and Whoppers for a while then?

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[Stargoat]

Nonsense. Most of the fraud committed at banks occurs because of duress. Namely, the husband or boyfriend threatens a teller or personal banker and says "Steal money, or I'll hurt and kill you, or the kids, or the dog." (Yes, you would be surprised how often it is the dog.)

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[Queer Boy]

If your employees are proud to be part of the firm, and if you treat them with respect and pay a decent wage, they are less likely to turn to fraud.

Your statement is a supposition based on US culture. Different countries and cultures have entirely different work ethics.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[router]

Exactly right. People don't understand this natively, but when I explain it this way they get it:
If your annual wage is 600$, then you can work all year to scam 600$ and its a good job. So putting in what to us is rediculous amounts of work to scam 50$ is normal to someone making that in a month.

This will only continue; witness what happens on the US-Mexico border if you need more evidence. US average income is 4x Mexican with less internal disparity. Now contrast that with India, which is 1/12 US per capita income and even more internal wealth disparity than Mexico.

These idiots just screwed up because they went after wealthy clients; imagine if they took 9 dollar fees monthly from .1% of the bottom quintile of customers and called them legitimate sounding names, then wrote bogus procedures for the call center to follow regarding the fees. They would hvae skimmed billions before they were caught.

andy

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[testadicazzo]

On the other hand, you don't have to be poor to be so consumed by greed that you're willing to steal or commit fraud to further line your pockets. Just look at Enron, Worldcom, etc if you want proof of that.

Too true. There are two problems to consider. Rampant poverty will increase crime. Especially in the event where labor is being done, but the laborers are not reaping the rewards of their labor. So that's one contributing factor, in the U.S. as well as abroad.

A second contributing factor is the culture of greed that dominates in the modern world. Wealth without labor is the new goal. One of the most elequent discussions of this I have seen was by harvey pekar, in an issue of American Splendor (sorry, don't remember what issue). But we have a culture (which we are aggresively exporting) which places more importance on the possession of wealth than on honesty, integrity, or a strong work ethic.

I'm hoping that this is actually changing, that the Bernard Ebbers, the Dick Cheneys, the Kenneth Lays and Darrel McBride's become outcasts and pariahs, shunned and hated enough by society at large that people feel a strong enough social pressure to mitigate their greediest instincts.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[godless dave]

"I, for one, do not buy into this Lou Dobbs racist/nationalist claptrap that says that we can't trust foreigners." That is not even close to what Lou Dobbs is saying. It has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with regulation and law enforcement.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[ErikZ]

The people with the least money will notice 9$ missing. They usually are budgeting things very closely.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[PerspexAvenger]

Well, given the long turnaround times, and the... frankly alien logic sometimes applied, I can quite legitimately assume Mars...

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[skahshah]

Do you mean you know one country (or more, and US not included) where employees are proud to be part of the firm, treated with respect, payed a decent wage, and yet willing to fraud because it's in their culture, or their works ethics ?

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[kcbrown]

It doesn't matter where people are located. What matters is that you have trustworthy people handling your business. And, you know what? Untrustworthy people are everywhere.

While this is true, and while I agree with your general sentiment, it doesn't address the core problem here.

And that problem is that by outsourcing anything, whether it's to an entity in the same country or to an entity in a different country, you are intentionally throwing away control over the process in question.

It's important to ask whether or not the process being outsourced is a required part of the business. If it is, then it's probably something that can't be trusted to an outside entity. And if it's not, then perhaps one should consider ditching it entirely.

IT, for instance, is a required part of most businesses these days. While IT itself may not be what the company in question specializes, in, most companies would be insane to outsource their IT operations, because the consequences to the company of their IT processes being implemented poorly can be very high indeed. It's reasonable to get additional help via contractors and such, but only when there's direct oversight of the contractors by employees of the company.

This is why I tend to be against the notion of outsourcing business processes of any kind -- it's a dangerous, foolish thing to do. Any business process that is a reasonable candidate for outsourcing is likely to also be a reasonable candidate for dropping entirely.

Now, how does this relate to the original article? Simple: if the bank in question had kept the call center an in-house operation, they would have had direct control over the security procedures used to maintain customer confidentiality. By outsourcing, they intentionally chose to relinquish control over everything involved in running a call center (which includes how sensitive information is handled) to the company they outsourced their call center operations to. Now their customers are suffering the consequences.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[PreviouslySeen]

And that problem is that by outsourcing anything, whether it's to an entity in the same country or to an entity in a different country, you are intentionally throwing away control over the process in question.

I completely agree. Especially since I used the same argument during an analysis of system options.

I take it that you are not in senior management? :) Many of our systems are totally f(&)(d up because they could not see past the alleged $$ savings on the spreadsheet. Oh, and when a payroll doesnt run or an interface fails for the n'th time because someone at the outsourced host forgot to start a process, the lost productivity doesnt get counted against the alleged $$$ saved.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[Pig Hogger]

Wait a minute.... green employees? Where the heck does your company outsource to?!

Diarrhia?

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[mysticwhiskey]

Maybe they employ trees... cause, y'know, they have an intimate knowledge of hierachical structure, branching, and know when to leave working code alone.

Apologies for the bad puns.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[anethema]

"Luckily, the bad people are outnumbered by the good. I can just take a look at my lists and figure that one out."

Santa??

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[supersmike]

Untrustworthy people are everywhere.

Well-said. Still, I'm glad this happened in India, where the police were on-the-ball and willing to cooperate, as opposed to some other place where local authorities make no attempts to cooperate with foreign.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[killjoe]

One of the problems is that the indian workers know they are being employed because the company does not care enough about it's employees to pay them well. Currently they are the cheapest labor around so they get to have jobs but they also know that tommorow the company will probably move to vietnam or some other place where the people are even poorer.

The really sad thing is that the indians also know they can't ever ask for raises or demand better working environments. Again the company will move to another place where it can exploit cheaper and more compliant workforce.

For india outsourcing will be a boom and bust thing. As soon as another country can make a case that their employees will work for less money the jobs will dry up and they will all be on the street. It's not like the US corporations have any moral problems with prison labor or indentured slavery.

It does not surprise me that the attitude is "get it while the getting is good".

I am not condoning crime, it just doesn't surprise me.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[Reaperducer]

Apologies for the bad puns.

You're bark ing up the wrong tree with that one. With so many shady characters on Slashdot, you're bound to find one with roots in the heart of the problem. Then again, if you're lucky you might find one with a deciduous personality who won't needle you about it.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[R.Caley]

Untrustworthy people are everywhere.

The big problem is that stupid customers are everywhere.

Assume for the moment that this is confirmed to be Citibank. Now, count the number of people with citibank two weeks from now. That is a measure of the prevelance of stupid customers.

If the bank knew that they would lose most of their customers the first time this kind of thing happened they would get much more secure very fast.

As it is they work on the theory that most of their customers are willing to have their money hanging out the window for the first sub-minimum wage employee to walk off with, if the alternative is 10 minutes on the phone moving to another bank.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[Atryn]

The people with the least money will notice 9$ missing. They usually are budgeting things very closely.

I disagree... Most of the folks I know that make little money in the US are terrible at budgeting. But still, it is clear that they probably could increase their chances of not getting caught with access to more information.

I'd bet you could build profiles of the types of people that would be a lot less likely to notice or to ACT on some small illogical fee or errant charge... Students come to mind for some reason... or maybe base it on types and frequency of purchases...

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[poot_rootbeer]

I, for one, do not buy into this Lou Dobbs racist/nationalist claptrap that says that we can't trust foreigners.

The issue is not that "furriners" are inherently any more or less trustworthy than your fellow countrymen.

The issue is that when you DO come across a person who abuses trust, it's a LOT easier to get recompense when that person is subject to the same laws and regulations that you are.

If someone in New York steals $2000 from my bank account, the cops go arrest him and get my money back. If someone in New Delhi steals it, the local cops have to coordinate with foreign law enforcement, negotiate an extradition, so on, so forth. Unless you have six or seven figure sums being stolen, it's not going to be worth everyone's time to bring someone from another country to justice.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[Jaeph]

It's not a question of people - of course people are just people, wherever you go. It's a question of governments.

If the law in a country allows us to go after and punish people like this, then I don't care. If it protects them, then raise the "damn foreigners" invective a notch. If you want to argue the grey area where cultures are different resulting in different acts being termed "crimes", talk to a lawyer or philosopher cause I ain't biting.

-Jeff

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[sac13]

I do not buy into the Lou Dobbs nationalist claptrap, either. I believe that outsourcing is a logical direction for business to move in. However, with the state of the global environment today, there is something to be said about having to deal with domestic employees that do things like this instead of having to worry about two different nations with two different sets of laws. Once there is more structure in the laws dealing with international crimes such as this, the issue is irrelevant. But, business does have to consider it today.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[prockcore]

Wait a minute.... green employees? Where the heck does your company outsource to?!

Some people say "I don't care if people are white, black, purple or green". Ah hold on now... purple or green? You gotta draw the line somwhere. To hell with purple people! ...unless they're suffocating. then, help 'em! -Mitch Hedberg

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[955301]

The underlying problem has nothing to do with foreigners being untrustworthy. Prosecution of criminals in other countries is far more complicated, particularly when the countries don't share the same fundamental basis for prosecution - copyright law, patent law, *personal privacy*.

Political appeasement between the two countries government for damage countrol isn't good enough. You can try to hide behind the "that's racist" tree and flail your arms, but the fact is, it is more risky to spread your clients personal information outside of the circle of law your company operates and your clients live.

And frankly, there is no excuse for doing it. Systems can be built in such a way that a customer can call a foreign call center and say "I need to update my address". They give an account number and the system doesn't display their data, it simply provides fields to the CSR to validate what the customer tells them, one piece of data at a time. Then give them a new set of fields to enter the new address which updates the account. All without handing over all of the information necessary to impersonate the individual.

The Requirements are simple to define:

The system must not permit the CSR to view customer information - only account and billing.
The system should validate that individual elements of information given by a customer are correct.
The system should allow individual elements of the customer information to be updated.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[955301]

I disagree. Your employees can be unhappy or desperate and commit fraud because of things they do in their own time. In fact, it's more likely that disgruntled employees got that way because something at work was merely the straw that broke the camel's back.

Counterexample:
Lets say I employee you in my accounting department. You marry a man who after the honeymoon admits to have over 3 times your annual household income in debt. You start embezzling money from my company.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[ForestGrump]

I'm moving to Antarctica. I can trust my fellow penguins.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[cybpunks3]

That would be great, if there were any alternatives to Citibank that didn't outsource. But I don't think there are any.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[ErikZ]

I was thinking back to my student days. Everyone I knew didn't have much money, and they had budgeting things down very closely.

Maybe that's unusual. But that's what I've experenced.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[jnf]

First let me say I agree with you, people will be people regardless of birthplace or birth race, c'est la vie. Now that I've said that, let me start by explaining that I am a security analyst for a very large multi-national ASP who services mostly banks but we also have government contracts- needless to say we have plenty of sensitive information all over the world. Additionally realize that we have about 5 permanent bases in India, 3 in Canada, 3 or 4 in the UK and 2 in .au. We operate over 17k ATM's throughout the US and Canada, so on and so forth. Here is the catch we run into with our employee's from India ... you ready? we can't do background checks on them and many positions require superuser access to many sensitive systems. We can't even comply with our policies as a result of this, and _that_ is the risk we face outsourcing. Don't be surprised when you hear something similar for a company that starts with an 'e' and ends with an 's'.

Re:Indian, Native American, Ukrainian, Nigerian

[R.Caley]

That would be great, if there were any alternatives to Citibank that didn't outsource.

Outsourcing isn't the problem. Lack of security is the problem.

But is doesn't even matter if the next bank you move to is significantly better. If each instance of a security screw up caused a bank's income to collapse, it would soon be the case that there would be banks paying attention to security, becuase the first to do so would get a sudden increase in business, and the rest could not afford not to follow.

not hacking

[romit_icarus]

I wonder if this can be called hacking, looks more like a combination of poor process and security management on the part of Citi (if it is indeed Citi). Companies in the US should be wary of the extent of employee churn that happens in BPO firms in India. I'm in India, and I often get to hear of ex-employees stealing databases when they leave...

Re:not hacking

[stiggle]

Its not called stealing - its providing an insecure off-site backup :-)

Re:not hacking

[indigeek]

A much more detailed article here
However it happened, it appears that the effect on outsourcing is going to be big.

International Outsourcing

[chrisbeatty]

I know this could happen to anyone given a lax state of security.

But it's surely much tougher to vet people who have access to your systems when their whole culture is different (nevermind the fact that they're half the world away)

A lot more care needs to be taken when outsourcing internationally, otherwise the savings made will end up being spent on PR & the like after a cock up.

Cover sheets

[avidday]

If the TPS reports had of had the correct coversheet on them, none of this would have happened!

Not to be a troll but..

[t_allardyce]

I only hope this news flashes through the industry and gets in the heads of CEOs and PHBs everywhere who then start aborting outsourcing attempts.

If you're in Europe, fear not, the data protection act bars your personal information from leaving the EU (i think?).. unless its going to the CIA so they can have you extradited without trial.. Either way, if you're worried, call up your bank and demand to know where they send your data, its public information by law.

Re:Not to be a troll but..

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

So they should start aborting outsourcing attempts because the US doesn't have data privacy laws?

Rather than phoning up your banks and finding out where your information is ending up, which can be a tedious process, shouldn't you be phoning up your congress representatives and asking them to enact laws which provide for your privacy?

Re:Not to be a troll but..

[Mike1024]

I only hope this news flashes through the industry and gets in the heads of CEOs and PHBs everywhere who then start aborting outsourcing attempts.

I'm not sure Indians are any more likely to jot down card numbers that thier minimum-wage US counterparts. Except, of course, that an Indian phone jockey makes a better wage (by local standards), arguably giving them less reason to committ such fraud.

It's annoying when you can't understand what someone says on the phone, sure, but I don't think they're any more likely to be criminals than thier western counterparts.

Michael

Re:Not to be a troll but..

[t_allardyce]

You misunderstood, Im not saying they're any different from non-outsourced workers, im just saying i HOPE that people in charge get a knee-jerk reaction to stop outsourcing so that jobs can go back home, in fact in many cases, outsourced people work harder and are more loyal! - thats the whole problem!! who wants to compete with hard-working, loyal and cheap employees? we want our jobs to stay at home.

Re:Not to be a troll but..

[t_allardyce]

I'm not to bothered what the US does, in Europe that information is publicly available pretty easily, however its obvious that the law is being broken here - the number of times ive been called up 'randomly' by an indian telemarketer asking if i want to upgrade my phone is insane, they don't seem to understand the fact that im amish and we don't even have a cell tower or land-line for 100 miles! Its unlikely congress will pass a law that requires 100's of companies to spend millions vetting out-sourced workers or giving customers the right to see their own personal information on record and where its being sent.

Re:Not to be a troll but..

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

How is someone half way across the world supposed to know if you're Amish? If they kept information about your lifestyle, you'd find that to be an invasion of privacy. I'd doubt anyone in Slashdot, much less Pune, India, would have guessed you were Amish.

If it's unlikely Congress will pass a law to help its own citizens protect their privacy, that's a reason to stop voting for those guys, and not a reason to stop outsourcing.

Re:Not to be a troll but..

[The_Mr_Flibble]

Ok I have an abbey account and I recently needed to contact them regarding some information I required so I called them. A woman answered the phone and she was noticebly indian her accent was way to heavy anyway I conclude my business with her (only having to repeat myself a couple of times.
I then did some checking aparently the credit card division had been sold to an american company who then outsourced the call centre to india. I had not been told about this by my bank. So without my express written permision they had exported my personal information to america who then exported it to india.
So are they in breach of the eu data protection act or not ?
I am pretty sure that the dataprotection act states that the data cannot be exported to a country that does not have a data protection act (ala india) but america does have one so that's okay however I don't think americas data protection type act has any such conditions in it so technically they haven't broken it.

Re:Not to be a troll but..

[Afty0r]

So are they in breach of the eu data protection act or not ?
I am pretty sure that the dataprotection act states that the data cannot be exported to a country that does not have a data protection act (ala india) but america does have one so that's okay however I don't think americas data protection type act has any such conditions in it so technically they haven't broken it.

Yes they are in breach of the UK Data Protection Act, and no, the USA is not considered "OK" for exporting your data to, it does not have an equivalent of the Data Protection Act so passing your information to into the hands of employees of an American firm also contravenes the Data Protection Act.

Ebay do this, by the way - if you join Ebay UK, despite their assurances that they will not pass your data outside the EU, I get spammed by their mailers based in the US, and registered to some faceless corporation in office 43534 floor 3254 some building, some no-name city.

Re:Not to be a troll but..

[stoborrobots]

Not only that, but an Amish getting cold calls when the nearest landline is 100 miles away!

+5 Can't get the joke right!

Re:Not to be a troll but..

[radish]

in fact in many cases, outsourced people work harder and are more loyal!- thats the whole problem!! who wants to compete with hard-working, loyal and cheap employees? we want our jobs to stay at home.

So you're arguing that because Americans are lazy, untrustworthy and greedy (the opposite of hard-working, loyal, and cheap), they should keep their jobs? Well, it's an interesting idea, but I have to say I might not invest in a company which has you making policy decisions.

Re:Not to be a troll but..

[t_allardyce]

Arghh! Why does no-one understand what im trying to say? If i was making decisions for a company of course i would outsource - hell, i'd probably conclude that India was far too expensive and find some cheap 12 year old Cambodians for $10 a year. However, from my current perspective, and i assume many slashdotters are in similar shoes, i don't want my job going anywhere and neither does anyone else, lazy or not.

Re:Not to be a troll but..

[DavidTC]

He's using the traditional Amish solution.

VoIP. Over his cable modem.

Odd that this article is here

[jago25_98]

When I take credit card info over the phone I could do just the same.

The only slight difference is that it's worth more over there.

So I find it odd that this is considered different.

Re:Odd that this article is here

[romit_icarus]

I completely agree. The news article is sensationalising a common theft into a hacking incident!

Re:Odd that this article is here

[yahyamf]

The only slight difference is that it's worth more over there.

That's not the only reason, it's very easy to in India to set up a bank account using a false name and address. Hell, you can even set up a whole new identity passport and all for a couple hundred bucks. I guess these perps were too dumb to do that and got traced easily.

Re:Odd that this article is here

[Queer Boy]

So I find it odd that this is considered different.

It's different because there's no clear path of liability as far as the company is concerned and there is no clear path of prosecution. Of course the money is insured against things like this but when it becomes enough money defrauded it can become a serious problem.

If you steal money in the US (unless you're an exec) you're going to be tried, fined and jailed. What happens if you do it from another country? It's possible that some of the things done to defraud the customers are not illegal. The actual theft is but what gets most people into jail is the crimes committed around the theft.

the bank is the problem

[cahiha]

There are a bunch of banks at which security is poor and at which attitudes surrounding privacy are lax. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether they outsource or not or where: the problem is the bank and its management.

Us versus Them

[victorhooi]

Hi,

Well, it's not so much a case of us-versus-them, but a matter of accountability and proesecuting them. An earlier poster made the case that this makes it somehow easier to track, but I think this is an absolute load of claptrap

Remind me again, exactly how many people are there in India? So how exactly does the fact that you know it originated from India help you? Or say Brazil, China, etc - all of these places, though poor, are in fact heavily populated, densely packed, and often the authorities are loathe to co-operate with foreign officials (honestly - whose side do you think the Indian police force/bureacrats are on?)

Outsourcing critical infrastructure, and potentially dangerous data that can bite you back later is a recipe for disaster.

I'm Australian, and recently there was a furor over Boeing's court victory allowing them to discriminate against Australian workers, and select only US citizens - a lot of Australian's were mad, but I myself thought that Boeing had a perfectly logical argument.

You can call me a racist (fyi, I'm chinese - and the US's witch-hunting of Chinese "spies" irks me, but hey, it's another one on a growing pile of 'em...lol), so what the heck...

Victor Hooi

crores

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it with Indians counting numbers? Even when typing large amounts in numericals, they seem to put commas in unusual places. Could someone explain the system, please?

Re:crores

[romit_icarus]

It's just a different way of grouping of decimal places. In India it's common to have them group two decimal places instead of three. Get a better description here: http://www.answers.com/topic/indian-numbering-syst em Globalisation is however making indians, albeit reluctantly, shift to the million/billion system, but it'll take time...

Re:crores

[kaalamaadan]

The system is the, afaik, British/European.

The Least significant 3 digits are grouped together, then it is in groups of two digits each.

For example, 3000000 in American notation is: 3,000,000 [3 million] and in the Indian system is 30,00,000 [30 lakhs].

Also, the commonly used powers of 10 include:

1 lakh - 1/10ths of a million

and

1 crore - 10 millions.

Re:crores

[Sukh]

Nobody uses the British billion - not even Britons. So yeah, the yankee billion.

Re:crores

[pommiekiwifruit]

But you can see that Patrick Moore really really wants to :-) he often says "thousand million" rather than (USian) billion anyway.

Re:crores

[IANAAC]

English speakers, no. But Latin America and a good portion of non-English speaking Europe uses "thousand million". Probably more, but those are my only direct experience.

Re:crores

[radish]

That may well be the Indian system, but it's neither British nor European (at least, I've never seen it).

To take your example:

British : 3,000,000 (same as US)
German : 3.000.000 (they use the comma as a decimal seperator)

I think much of continental Europe also uses the German system, some may use the British.

Re:Begin the racist rants

[Detritus]

Read it again. Where does it say that the criminals were Indian?

Besides, are Indians too good to be thieves?

Citibank Outsourcing

[Coward the Anonymous]

Citicards, the Credit card division of Citibank, got a new CIO several months ago. Mitchell Habib. He came from GE Medical. Before leaving there, he outsourced about 75% of their IT staff to India. He's currently doing the same at Citi. I worked there as a contractor. Two other contractors on the team and I were unable to get our contracts renewed because it came down from on high that all new contracts had to go thru TCS, Tata Consulting Services. They are the Indian outsourcing company that he used in the past. I recently went back to visit some friends and met my replacement. A nice young Indian guy making a third to a quarter of what I made there.

From what I understand, the standard rate for calculating your budget for contract work went from $70/hr to $22/hr. Of course, I believe they charge around $40/hr for their workers in the states.

Can't compete with that.

Here are some links about Mitchell Habib and TCS:

http://www.rediff.com/money/2003/apr/03tcs.htm?zcc =rl

http://www.tcs.com/0_media_room/releases/200204apr /20020411_ge_medical.htm

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[ErikZ]

Woah, you can make 22$ an hour?

Although it's far less than 70$ an hour, I don't see why you can't compete with that. 22$ an hour is still more than what I'm making now. 45k a year is a decent salary.

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[hughk]

TCS were charging only 5% less for on-site consulting in Germany than local contractors. Some of the work was very good, but most needed major rework.

Indian companies are fairly used to having to pay backhanders to get work. Whereas, I'm sure that a major company like TCS is fairly straight, the fact that major companies can parcel off work to remote locations with inadequate monitoring does raise questions.

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[Tiroth]

There is a huge amount of variability, but staffing contractors generally are taking home somewhere around 50% of the bill rate. That means $22 an hour is more like a $25,000-$30,000 salary.

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[Anonymous Coward]

...it came down from on high that all new contracts had to go thru TCS, Tata Consulting Services.

These "preferred vendor" arrangements are admittedly a major pain in the neck for consultants. Pretty much all of them are nothing more than glorified paper pushing middlemen. For operating a repetitive, easily automated process that should cost at most $10 USD per payroll cycle, they want a 5-30% cut. Fortunately, they seem to only infest the larger companies for now. However, they still represent a threat to everyone who wants to leverage the services delivery business model of open source.

Standing as a monopoly or oligopoly gateway to these larger companies, you flat out don't pass through until you pay their toll. These preferred vendors represent a huge frictional cost to the adoption of open source-based services.

The larger companies use these middlemen however, because it is more efficient from their point of view to outsource the processes to deal with contractors. Make it even more efficient to do it another way, and these companies will switch to that method. Or technology. So that means stuff that geeks consider very boring, like HR-XML standardization efforts, are actually quite important to make it very easy to operate e-procurement systems which reduce the frictional costs of dealing with business entities.

I suspect that the vast majority of Slashdotters are 9-to-5'ers rather than contractors, however. So I'm probably just wasting my breath trying to convince anyone here that making it easy to set up contracts and new business relationships would vastly improve their standard of living by enabling them to more easily go into business for themselves.

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[Grishnakh]

Although it's far less than 70$ an hour, I don't see why you can't compete with that. 22$ an hour is still more than what I'm making now.

Just because that's more money that you're making flipping burgers doesn't mean it's a good salary.

For an experienced professional contractor (who need to charge more to make up for the lack of benefits and stability), $22/hour is insulting (don't forget they only get a fraction of that, and their agency gets the rest).

Please leave discussions involving salaries to adults.

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[Moofie]

You're a dick. I need to never hire you.

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[LaCosaNostradamus]

Habib is what is called a "hatchet man". He is brought in to give people the hatchet, to chop or cull them out of the business. In the end, when the hatchet man has cut enough people, he himself is given the hatchet. Unfortuantely for the American workforce, hatchet men move from company to company, being used like a freelance assassin with a seriously overdriven work ethic, wiping out hordes of workers. Habib is the ultimate expression of the mercenary consultant. In a way, we are all guilty of creating people like him.

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[TheGratefulNet]

you can't even live in a shared doghouse in the bay area for that amount.

unskilled admins make that much here. or more.

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[Grishnakh]

If you think $22/hour is anything less than a total insult for a contractor, I wouldn't want to work for you!

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[Moofie]

I wasn't saying that it's an insult or not. I'm saying that somebody with such a combative attitude will not be an asset to me.

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[Grishnakh]

Combative attitude? You infer this from a single internet post? You do realize that people take on different personas on the internet than they do at work, right? Especially when they're trying to get a "+1 Funny".

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[Moofie]

Wow. Feeling threatened much?

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[ErikZ]

Great. Where are the job ads for "Unskilled Admins"?

Re:Citibank Outsourcing

[fuzzybunny]

I'm right there with you, bud.

Thankfully, large companies here (Switzerland) are comparatively flexible about 'preferred vendor' type deals. Basically it just means that large clients only feel like dealing with 'x' companies, meaning that small, one-man firms often have to run their contracts through pimps (aka "contract agencies".) Some of this is also caused by kickbacks from headhunter outfits to departmental managers, and by collusion between client firms, but hey, what can you do.

I don't like these guys, as I find them generally pretty useless and not particularly ethical, and don't want them getting any cash they don't deserve. Our solution to this has been to form a small company (blatant plug) based solely on trust among some friends in similar lines of technical consulting.

Basically, the company is a vehicle for us to run our contracts through; the only percentage we pay is a small amount to the company accounts for legal/accounting/logistics fees. We don't expand out of principle, unless it's someone we know and trust. Similarly, when we're asked for referrals by clients, we'll send someone whom we're comfortable recommending--we don't get anything from it, aside from a reputation for honesty when that person does a good job.

I've seen way too much collusion, greed and opportunism here from large customers and consulting/contract agencies, but my colleagues and I have managed to survive very well by doing good work and building strong networks with colleagues at our customers'. I've been preaching this as a nice work methodology for a while now, so you're not the only one :)

It's not that simple...

[ImaLamer]

I just have to say that this is a bigger problem than a simple "I told you so".

When you outsource certain operations you are giving people who have no connection with your customers their private information. Banking account numbers? Some people still don't use online banking because it scares them and we don't see this as a huge liability?

Really, what if a few thousand credit card and bank account numbers got into the hands of suspected terrorists? If they made a one time shot at getting items to fence or cash withdraws (wire transfers) and split, they suddenly have resources that was taken right from the American people.

I'm by no means saying that you should be suspect of *any* foreign person or enterprise. I'm thinking of the type of people who *might* get their hands on my/our information. What good is it to give to the people like EPIC when we give our information to people we can't necessarily track down? Can anyone guarantee that we will be able to bring someone to justice, under our laws (and equally for their benefit the Constitution)? I've worked on the phone making sales, and the problem we had was we were banned from taking credit cards because a few people screwed it up for everyone.

Of course, if someone wants the information they can get it. It just makes me wonder why we give our sensitive information to a foreigner when we need parts for our Dell (and by extension everyone else I don't care to list).

Re:It's not that simple...

[Threni]

> When you outsource certain operations you are giving people who have no
> connection with your customers their private information.

What connection do local call centres have with a banks customers that people who live further don't?

Anyway, I don't care if my money gets stolen, as I'll be getting it back.

> just makes me wonder why we give our sensitive information to a foreigner

Because it's cheaper than giving it to a `fellow American`. I should have thought that were obvious.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Chicane-UK]

Oh thats it.. play the terrorism trump card.

I know you say 'I'm by no means saying you should be suspect of *any* foreign person..' - but really you don't mean it. You wouldn't have made such a post in the first place if you didn't really mean it.

At the end of the day we are a global economy.. our card numbers and personal bits of information have been flying all over the globe for years now. Quite frankly I trust the people working in the indian call centres as much as I trust the person working down the high street in my own city bank.. i've worked with a number of consultants from India on coding projects here in the UK and have found them to be nothing but exceptionally dedicated, meticulous and hard working.

Just because they are foreign, it doesn't automatically make them a potential terrorist for christs sake.

Re:It's not that simple...

[mAineAc]

Because it's cheaper than giving it to a `fellow American`. I should have thought that were obvious.

I find this odd. Many Jobs that I have tried to get they will not give you if you have bad credit because you are a potential security risk. But now those same companies outsource to some of the poorest countries. How is this not a security risk?

Re:It's not that simple...

[Dr. Evil]

I for one am glad of the security I can place in trusting my fellow national. Ever since foreigners started bombing federal buildings, sending bombs to universities, sniping people randomly in Washington, and god knows what else, it's good to know that we can draw a clear line between "us" and "them"

Re:It's not that simple...

[lantenon]

Anyway, I don't care if my money gets stolen, as I'll be getting it back.

You should care. The costs investigating the theft to try and return the money to you, and the possible subsequent loss to the bank if they never recover (but refunded to you) are built into your bank fees, interest rates, etc. Less theft = lower costs for banks = lower costs for consumers.

Re:It's not that simple...

[way2trivial]

1st of all, Osama and crew are funded just fine, they don't need your piddly thousands per account scam to pay for their efforts...

if you DON'T outsource- aren't you still giving people who have no connection with your customers their private information?

C'mon, it doesn't matter if the call center is in bangalore or in tampa bay, what matters is the legal hoops required to get it back/make reparations...

remember the afghanni woman who had been hired as a medical transcriptionist but not paid for her work? and threatened to make US citizens medical records public? she wasn't breaking any afghanni law, and she had NO OTHER RECOURSE for recompse for her labors.. (and good for her) the only real bonuses to outsourcing can be mitigated by differing laws, and the ability to 'seek damages' internationally...

These kinds of (employee, white collar) thefts occur.
The fact that it was overseas should not make it /. newsworthy unless there was some amusing or technical quirk in international law that made it newsworthy.. I see nothing however, in the headline, any different than a NY times biz blurb about any other fradulent scheme at a major us corp..

Re:It's not that simple...

[oakgrove]

> What connection do local call centres have with a banks customers that people who live further don't? The GP isn't comparing American call centers to Indian ones. The contrast is Indian call centers vs. the bank actually handling customer care services inhouse with their own employees. It stands to reason that an employee of the actual bank itself living here in America and subject to American laws and consequences is less likely to participate in these type of shenanigans than somebody working in some call center thousands of miles away in some other country.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Threni]

> You should care. The costs investigating the theft to try and return the money
> to you, and the possible subsequent loss to the bank if they never recover (but
> refunded to you) are built into your bank fees, interest rates, etc. Less theft
> = lower costs for banks = lower costs for consumers.

I don't know the details of how banks work in the US but I'm in the UK. I get paid into my current account (think you lot call it a `checking account`). It pays 0.2% interest or something - pretty useless. But the account is free, and I get a debit card with which I can withdraw money from a hole in the wall (ATM) machine, or use it to buy stuff on the net or in shops. I don't get charged for this (the shop does). I have two credit cards, also free (as I don't borrow on them) - one mastercard, one visa - which I use online/other the phone, as you get better protection, free insurance etc. Every month or so I move any money from my current account that doesn't need to be there to pay credit card bills, standing orders etc, into a high interest online account (these average 4.5% to 5.5% in the UK. I think you get something crappy like 2% in the US).

So, were my bank to lose money (from my account) as a result of fraud, I probably wouldn't even know about it as I wouldn't be the first/only person to suffer, so chances are it'll be discovered and corrected before I know about it. And were I to notice it, I'd demand the bank sort it out, which I have every faith they would. I'd not lose any interest, and I'd never be out of pocket such that I couldn't buy any food (always a good idea to have some cash at home in cash the networks all go down or whatever).

Sure, some people haven't figured out how little interest they get in a current account and lose a fair bit of money each year by leaving it all there - their problem. Some people need to borrow money - their problem. Some people choose to pay for their account, or credit cards - their problem. At the end of the day, the banks make so much money from mortgage owners, taking 4 or whatever days to process cheques (`checks` in the US) that the money they lose from credit card (or whatever) fraud is negligable. Plus, they have insurance against that too! This is partly why `chip and pin` has taken so long to get sorted in the UK - they could have done it years ago (as they did in France, Denmark, New Zealand etc) but it's not until fraud loses them hundreds of millions rather than just tens of millions that it's worth undertaking such a large project.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Anonymous Coward]

Feel free to automatically Score this as 0, however these are facts.

1) India is pissed at the US cause the USA is allowing Pakistan to buy fighter planes, and because the US is trying to prevent India from building an oil pipeline from Iraq to India (hey, that's Halliburton's job)

2) 10% of Indians are Moslems. That's over 100 million, which isn't trivial. After 911, that frightens me.

Re:It's not that simple...

[downkaos]

"Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one." - Benjamin Franklin Read it, learn it, love it

Re:It's not that simple...

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

Did you even read the parent's post? Perhaps this sentence would enlighten you
Many Jobs that I have tried to get they will not give you if you have bad credit because you are a potential security risk.

At no point does the post you are replying to talk about loaning money. You see a credit check has become a standard practice in screening job candidates. So in the future, try reading the post you are replying to instead of just assuming the parent post is making bad analogies.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Threni]

> Did you even read the parent's post?

Yes. Unless you're suggesting that the jobs will be given to Indians with bad credit ratings then I remain unable to make the connection. Unless the suggestion is that no-one in India should be trusted because the nation is more poor than America. It's impossible to take this argument seriously.

>At no point does the post you are replying to talk about loaning money. You see
>a credit check has become a standard practice in screening job candidates.

No-one is objecting to credit checks being performed on individual workers. What you're suggesting is simply the racist `Indians are poorer than us and can't be trusted`.

Re:It's not that simple...

[unexpected]

I think that too many people focus their attention instinctively towards the "foreigners" simply because they are brought up to embrace xenophobia.

The real issue here is the danger of outsourcing functions which require personally identifiable information and other sensitive data.

I mean let's face it. Embezzling is not a new thing and it happens more often from within than from outside.

And on that note, I found some "Insightful" stuff about those "GODDAMNED FOREIGN TERRORISTessesssess":

Ted Kaczynski
aka The Unabomber
Born May 22, 1942, Chicago, IL.

Timothy McVeigh
aka The Oklahoma Bomber
Born April 23, 1968, Lockport, NY

John Allen Williams
aka John Allen Muhammad
aka The Washington Sniper
Born December 31, 1960, New Orleans, LA

Re:It's not that simple...

[Mattintosh]

You missed the point. Let me help you out a bit.

Main Entry: sarcasm
Pronunciation: 'sär-"ka-z&m
Function: noun
Etymology: French or Late Latin; French sarcasme, from Late Latin sarcasmos, from Greek sarkasmos, from sarkazein to tear flesh, bite the lips in rage, sneer, from sark-, sarx flesh; probably akin to Avestan thwar&s- to cut
1 : a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain
2 a : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual b : the use or language of sarcasm
synonym see WIT

All the crimes he mentioned were done by American citizens. Bombing federal buildings? McVeigh. Mailing bombs to universities? Kaczynski. Sniping people in Washington DC? Malvo. At least two of them thought they were fighting for their country, which they (somewhat correctly) saw as having been overrun by greedy corporate/big government idiots. I'm pretty sure Malvo was just getting a kick out of killing people.

In light of these examples, the "War on Terror" looks like a silly, yet all-too-serious, grab for power. In other words, I think you're preaching to the choir.

Re:It's not that simple...

[MysteriousPreacher]

From personal experience of working with outsourced call-centres in poorer countries, people there often have a bigger incentive to incentive to remain honest.

Pay, compared to what you would get elsewhere in the same country, is often relatively high. Presumably, if you were to lose the job, this would be a bit of a blow - particularly if the country doesn't have the same kind of social security safety nets we take for granted.

Also, a trip to an Indian prison probably isn't much fun. I'm not saying that a UK prison is a hotel but certainly, you'd expect higher standards in a developed western country.

If I get fired here, it would be pain but after a short period of time, I would be entitled to social security payments.

Re:It's not that simple...

[MysteriousPreacher]

I think that the pipeline is from India to Iran, not Iraq.

BBC News

Christians are just as big a concern personally speaking as Muslims.

Re:It's not that simple...

[dr_canak]

Do you mean this Pakastani woman?

http://archives.mtstars.com/main/7316.html

I don't recall another story involving an Afghan woman, but I could be wrong.

-and-

"she wasn't breaking any afghanni law, and she had NO OTHER RECOURSE for recompse for her labors.. (and good for her)"

Simply because she wasn't breaking a law in her country (which I'm not sure is true anyway) doesn't make it right. So I for one am not saying "good for her."

jeff

Re:It's not that simple...

[MysteriousPreacher]

How this is flamebait is beyond me.

This has little to do with terrorism. Although they could use this as a source of funding, It's just a theory.

Reminds me of the comments of a police officer after a man was arrested at Best Buy for trying to pay for a purchase with 2 Dollar notes.

Leaving Best Buy in leg irons

For Baltimore County police, said spokesman Bill Toohey, "It's a sign that we're all a little nervous in the post-9/11 world."

Whether this story is true, I don't know, but assuming it is true, what on earth does this have to do with terrorism?

Re:It's not that simple...

[Atryn]

I find this odd. Many Jobs that I have tried to get they will not give you if you have bad credit because you are a potential security risk. But now those same companies outsource to some of the poorest countries. How is this not a security risk?

You have confused me. Are you mixing credit worthiness with wealthiness? You can have lots more money than the folks in XXX poor country and still be less trustworthy.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Dun Malg]

McVeigh WAS a hero/patriot in the old school sense.

Yes, because Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, et al set off carts full of blasting powder in front of crowded Offices of the Crown, randomly killing people, and this is how the US won the war of independence.

Not that killing children in daycare is a good thing. But why were people in a federal building hiding behind children anyway? They know wackos attack federal people from time to time

WTF are you talking about? Name one attack on a Federal building prior to (or after!) McVeigh. They weren't "hiding behind children" because they had no idea there was anyone to hide from.

Bet some government wonk was dumb enough to beleive that nobody would ever think of attacking them with children as a flesh shield.

Bet it never occured to anyone that some dumbass would think it worthwhile to set off a bomb in front of a building full of boring, miscellaneous government drones smack dab in the middle of Dullsville. Really, what kind of tard do you have to be to pick such a stupid target? If he wanted a symbolic hit against the FBI or BATF, he should have picked a FBI or BATF field office, instead of a building with mostly Social Security and postal service workers.

McVeigh did some fucked up shit, but I still cannot help but feel some respect for having the balls to do what he did.

I have trouble respecting mental midgets with delusions of grandeur simply because they fancy themselves super-patriots. A man walking down the street randomly cutting of people's heads while shouting "no taxation without representation" is no patriot in my book either. I might agree with the premise McVeigh started from, but I'd have to give him a big fat zero for his chosen conclusion. Fuck McVeigh. Fuck him twice. He was a typical macho failed-to-get-into-Ranger-school-so-he-left-the-Ar my dumbfuck that gave other Desert Storm vets like me a bad name for a long time.

If more Americans had the nuts to take their government to task for oppressive things they have done to this great country, things wouldn't be as shitty and corp-controlled as they are.

Yes, but blowing one another up is not going to get the feds off our back. I guarantee that no amount of purely symbolic random bombing is going result in anything more than further oppression.

But here I am posting anonymously because I am afraid of what the government might do to me for speaking outside of the "official truth".

Talk about delusions of grandeur. The government doesn't care about some guy on a message board spouting off about patriotism. Really, you sound like an actual tin-foil hatter who thinks the government is trying to read his thoughts. The flaw in that line of reasoning is the presumption that the feds even give a fuck about a a nobody like you (or me, for that matter). They don't care about people like us! Get over yourself!

Re:It's not that simple...

[LaCosaNostradamus]

The point you're missing is that you're thinking of it purely in terms of security risk. When the board, shareholders, and Wall Street are breathing down your neck for more profit each year than the last year, you learn to stop thinking about things in pure security risk and start thinking in terms of "leveraged advantage", "strategic sourcing", and all the other buzzwords that are used for indulging in the extreme greed of Hypercapitalism.

Just look at the words "strategic sourcing". Unless you have those words in your annual report this year, chances are you're going to be fired by the board. But those words can hide a complete lack of security concerns. The words can imply anything, really, since they imply you are thinking strategically about your sources of materials and labor. So, what possible strategies can be used? In an enterprise fashion, there are probably dozens; in a department fashion, 100s to 1000s; and down to the level of managers and line employees, we end up with at least (literally) 10s of thousands of details. In this blizzard of details, executives hide their singular Hypercapitalist intent. Hence, it is not only possible, but LIKELY, to completely lose a concern for the security risks.

This is how we've ended up with a business environment in America that is effectively a Disneyland of facade, fraud, deception and posturing. "Nothing is real, and everything is permitted." Given this environment, A.Crowley would have loved the 21st Century.

Re:It's not that simple...

[number11]

No-one is objecting to credit checks being performed on individual workers.

But would you believe, some would object to workers pulling credit reports on potential supervisors and individuals in management, in order to check their trustworthiness.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Buran]

And if you're doing work for a US company which does business where it's illegal to disclose said records, said company bound you to an NDA where you can't talk about the records. So if you break the contract, YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW. I highly doubt that, in Pakistan, you're allowed to break contracts you sign. In fact, I understand that sometimes the payback for doing something like that is, shall we say, much more painful than what happens here ...

So no, no "good for her" from me, either. In fact, I'd have thrown the book at her.

Re:It's not that simple...

[QMO]

I have no reason to pull up a credit report on my super, since whatever I think about their trustworthiness won't affect their appointment. Plus, I am not likely to trust the company, or my supervisor, with thousands of dollars of my equipment and information.

However, if I were about to sign a contract that would require me to put a lot of money/time/knowledge up front, and expect a large payoff later I WOULD make sure, before I signed the contract, to somehow verify that the other party was likely to pay me.

Re:It's not that simple...

[psyon1]

Yes, but blowing one another up is not going to get the feds off our back. I guarantee that no amount of purely symbolic random bombing is going result in anything more than further oppression.

First off, I dont aggree with blowing up innocent people, but random bombing can in fact work in your favor. Like you said, with each bombing, the government would implement new laws, probably just ignoring many of our rights. With each new law, somebody will decide it is too much, and protest or who knows, take the side of the people doing the bombing. With each new pissed off person, your army would grow.

I dont think that would definatly happen, but you cant say it definatly wouldnt

Re:It's not that simple...

[argel]

And if you're doing work for a US company which does business where it's illegal to disclose said records, said company bound you to an NDA where you can't talk about the records. So if you break the contract, YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW

Actually, they broke the contract by failing to pay her. So she would no longer be bound by that contract.

Re:It's not that simple...

[QMO]

I don't know all the reported details, let alone the real details but:

If the company that she worked for was not paying her what they had agreed on, then they had broken the contract and she was no longer bound.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Buran]

If you get fired from a company that you signed an NDA for, that doesn't mean you can tell everyone what's in the NDA. Like, if you leave the military, they still expect you to respect their NDAs. (I'm sure they have some term for that).

Re:It's not that simple...

[Buran]

Please see my previous comment on this statement.

Re:It's not that simple...

[ravee]

And I guess it was a foreign teenager who sometime back barged into a highschool somewhere in the US and opened fire on the school students killing a number of them.

Reading your post brings to my mind this quote ... "People who live in glass houses should not throw stones at other peoples homes".

Re:It's not that simple...

[ravee]

My dear friend .... I fear you have got indo-phobia. And the only cure is to travel to India and staying there for 3 months.

Re:It's not that simple...

[squiggleslash]

I don't want to suggest that the publishing of private medical records is justified, but I think your contract argument is incorrect here: if she wasn't paid and wasn't going to be paid (it was a threat, after all), then her employer was already in breach of contract. Presumably she has a right to consider the contract null and void at that point.

If we agree that you'll not kick me in the balls, and I'll not either, are you going to feel restrained from doing just that if I kick you in the balls anyway? Would you? Huh? Would you? Come here and prove it.

I'm not sure what brought that on. I think I'll go and have a little nap somewhere. Maybe some chamomile tea.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Buran]

There's one problem: I'm female. :)

Re:It's not that simple...

[DavidTC]

And Newspeak everywhere, like 'identity theft'.

So let me get this straight, Large Corporation. A man came in and ripped you off by pretending to be me.

Man that sucks for you. But why, exactly, is something I should be concerned about?

'Identity theft'? That's a fairly odd concept...you mean you think he might kill and try to replace me?

No, I wasn't the victim already. I'm still here. I'm still me, clearly my 'identity' has not been stolen, whatever that means.

It sounds like you were the victim of fraud. I have no idea what you're talking about with regard to theft of something of mine, all my stuff is still here.

And if you don't immediately remove all hints of your ineptitude from my credit report I'll sue you for libel.

I'm sorry to have to threaten you so soon after you were ripped off, but blaming me is not the way to solve anything. If you want to know if I'm me the next time I show up, feel free to call me.

'Identity theft' my ass. That's like the cops chasing someone's car into the side of my house, and blaming me for not putting up better fences.

Re:It's not that simple...

[2old2rockNroll]

You have confused me. Are you mixing credit worthiness with wealthiness? You can have lots more money than the folks in XXX poor country and still be less trustworthy.

Not speaking for the GP, I'm not confused by it. No credit history is the same as a bad credit history, and neither one indicates any criminal behavior. Why should a foreign worker, about whom nothing is known, be considered more trustworthy than a resident with no credit history, especially when the foreign worker has no reason to fear the laws of some other country?

Re:It's not that simple...

[DavidTC]

The Pentagon isn't a 'Federal building', it is a military building. (It is, in fact, the military building.) If you count that, you'd have to count every single military structure ever hit as 'an attack on a Federal building'.

But of course people expect military buildings to be attacked, and wouldn't keep kids there. Anyone who doesn't expect the Pentagon to be the most wanted target by any enemy simply isn't paying attention.

(Do they even let kids in the Pentagon? Don't you have to be in intelligence or the military to even be in 99.99% of the building? By defination, not only is the building a legit military target, but everyone individually in the building would be one if they were standing alone in a field, except for the reporters standing around in the lobby or whatever.)

Anyway, you can complain Dun Malg wasn't clear, but no one expects random civilian government targets to be hit, and thus they aren't 'hiding' behind children there.

Now, there are a few targets that a 'hiding behid children' claim could be made of. Like the White House. Legit military target, it's the HQ of the commander-in-chief. It also has tends to have civilians living in it, namely, the president's family.

But not Misc. Government Building in some random state.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Fulcrum of Evil]

So if you break the contract, YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW.

In most places, breach of contract is a civil matter so no, you aren't breaking the law.

Re:It's not that simple...

[2old2rockNroll]

Yes. Unless you're suggesting that the jobs will be given to Indians with bad credit ratings then I remain unable to make the connection. Unless the suggestion is that no-one in India should be trusted because the nation is more poor than America. It's impossible to take this argument seriously.

Perhaps you're being deliberately obtuse? The point is that Citibank and other companies aren't checking the credit ratings of employees used by the offshore firms running the call centers. It's a bit of a double standard predicated on the money that can funneled into the executive officers compensation (bonuses). HTH.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Threni]

> The point is that Citibank and other companies aren't checking the credit
> ratings of employees used by the offshore firms running the call centers.

It's not a point I've seen raised in this discussion so far.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

No, but nice try suggesting that the conclusion of, those who have less have a greater economic incentive to steal is somehow racist. See the problem isn't the color of the workers skin, or whatever phenotypical trait you wish to discriminate by, but the distinct lack of knowledge about workers(and their trustworthiness) as a result of the stampede to set up shop were the cheap labor is.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Money for Nothin']

The Pentagon isn't a 'Federal building', it is a military building.

This is an inane distinction, given that the military is funded by federal taxes.

Let's make a logical deduction. Here are the premises:

1) There are 3 levels of government in the U.S.: federal, state, and local (municipal and county), which each own buildings attributable to their level of government

2) The military is an arm of the federal government (it says so in the Constitution)

Conclusion: buildings owned by the military are actually owned by the federal government, and therefore, are federal buildings.

You could make your argument about science labs too: Fermilab, Kennedy Space Center, Sandia, and so on. You could say "those aren't federal buildings, they're science labs!"

And yet, they are federally-funded, making them federal buildings.

We clearly recognize their differences for the purposes they serve -- federal military buildings are recognized as targets for war, but science buildings are not (IIRC). But they nevertheless are both federal buildings...

Re:It's not that simple...

[Dun Malg]

Well, the Pentagon was hit on 9/11 wasn't it? That's a federal building, duh.

No, a "Federal Building" is a distinct thing. It's usually a building or complex of buildings in a city that cetrally houses the various miscellaneous federal agencies that have too small a local presence to warrant their own separate office. I appreciate that you're just playing a semantic game by pretending that I meant "federal" strictly as an adjective applied to any old building, so I leave it to you to rebut the point using the definition of "federal building" I clearly implied.

I don't think he give Desert Storm vets a bad name (in my mind, anyway).

To be fair, I didn't get shit about it from everyone. But for quite a while the first thing a lot of people would say when I mentioned I was a DS vet was shit like "you know how to make bombs?" or "if I see you in a Ryder truck, I'm runnin' away! hahaha!"

He did give himself and the mid-90s right-wing militia movement a bad name though.

True. I did, however, get tired of being asked if I was in a militia as well.

Not that I advocate such things, but if you kill enough of them, sooner or later they won't have the forces to oppress you with.

Hitting a federal building in Oklahoma killed mostly people who really weren't "them", though. It was a symbolic bombing, and not a very well chosen one at that.

You know, kind of like what happened in Vietnam, where the VC's basic premise was "kill enough of them and they'll stop coming here to fight us"? And we lost 58,000 as a result, with about an order-of-magnitude more injured.

Not really comparable. We were outsiders in Vietnam. The feds are from here! They have no place to which they can be driven away.

The government doesn't care about some guy on a message board spouting off about patriotism.

People *have* been investigated on Kuro5hin for what they've written there before. And on LiveJournal.

Threats against the President and Vice President, even hypothetical ones, are specifically notorious for bringing the attention of humorless Secret Service agents. Vague statements saying you admire Jackass McVeigh for his patriotism (and most mundane paranoid nutjob rants) aren't worth an agent's time and are almost universaslly ignored.

Don't be an idiot. Of course the government cares what you write - every government in the world cares what its citizens write. How else can a government stay in power unless it squelches those who would try to restrict its power (and in particular, those who would disable or overthrow it)?

Seriously, the government has neither the time nor the resources to keep tabs on every weiner who posts a message saying they think the federal gov't sucks, or that McVeigh had a point. I was a signal intel analyst in the Army. The number one job in any intelligence gathering endeavor is knowing who and what not to bother listening to. They're not listening to you! They don't care (until you say you want to kill the President or VP, that is). Really, the obvious proof is that the people who actually are a threat and are worthy of watching don't post to /. anonymously thinking that will hide their identity!

The difference between America and other nations is that America, by Thomas Jefferson's own view, was *intended* to have an entire governmental change about every 20 years. Of course, that hasn't happened in actuality.

Continuous revolution. Damn straight. Too bad we lost sight of that.

(I am not the grandparent AC poster.)

Maybe, maybe not. Only the government knows for sure! (heh)

Re:It's not that simple...

[number11]

I am not likely to trust the company, or my supervisor, with thousands of dollars of my equipment and information.are likely to trust them with thousands of dollars, money owed you in pay, money that they must deposit in your retirement account. You trust them to correctly add up your time, and to pay you for all hours you work for the company. You trust them not to permit the company go belly-up, failing to make payroll, and you trust they will maintain insurance to cover you if you are injured on the job. You trust them not to ask, tell, or pressure you into doing anything illegal or unethical.

Do you really think no worker has ever been stiffed by their employers?

Re:It's not that simple...

[Dun Malg]

The Pentagon isn't a 'Federal building', it is a military building.

This is an inane distinction, given that the military is funded by federal taxes.

It's not an inane distinction, actually. When I said "Federal Building" in my original post, the meaning was obvious. Every major city has a big building of building complex colloquially called "the federal building". This is where all the alphabet soup agencies house their local employees. The Murrah Federal Building blown up by McVeigh was one such building. If there's inanity going on here, it's with those who sweepingly generalize with the literal interpretation of the words "federal building" rather than the obvious, specific meaning I presented it with.

Re:It's not that simple...

[HungWeiLo]

From personal experience of working with outsourced call-centres in poorer countries, people there often have a bigger incentive to incentive to remain honest.

And from my personal experience, it is the complete opposite. I don't want to generalize, but this applies to many that I have met working both here and in India - India has a culture of "yes" and positivity, but not in a good way. I get the feeling that it is rude in their culture to say "no" or give any notion of refusal. I suppose it is either a symbol of shame or failure to be a "no" man, as opposed to a "yes" man. What this all comes down to is that we have had a number of critical tests that "pass", when they should have all failed. They would rather swim through a huge pool of moral ambiguity and lie and say the test passed by faking test results in order to meet their test quotas for the week. Oh, by the way, we make products that can potentially kill thousands of people if it didn't work correctly. It drives me bonkers to know that some of these people call themselves engineers.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Reziac]

"Hitting a federal building in Oklahoma killed mostly people who really weren't "them", though. It was a symbolic bombing, and not a very well chosen one at that."

In fact, it was kinda like killing your own kids to protest how expensive Day Care is.

BTW, I didn't know you were a Desert Storm vet, but I'm glad you made it back okay!

Re:It's not that simple...

[2old2rockNroll]

It's not a point I've seen raised in this discussion so far.

It was implicit and obvious. You are being deliberately obtuse.

Re:It's not that simple...

[Atryn]

Why should a foreign worker, about whom nothing is known...

Why do you assume nothing is known about the foreign worker? Just as your credit is checked when you go for employment here, do you assume they do no screening of their candidates there?

Re:Begin the racist rants

[WIAKywbfatw]

I don't think it's racist per se to point out that the scammers were Indian - because they were, and that's not going to change - but it would be racist to extrapolate from that that Indians in general can't be trusted because of the actions of one or two people.

This is taking ...

[bushboy]

... outsourcing to new heights !

Re:Begin the racist rants

[heavy_metal_chemist]

If you posted this, why are you now posting anonymously? I can't be bothered to look up references but it is undeniable that slashdot readers are easily provoked into rants against indians. Why provoke it? Is it really important that the scammers were indian?

Pluses and Minuses of outsourcing

[Seventh Magpie]

Yes there are bad people everywhere so regardless where you set up shop, someone will take advantage. But, there are a lot of uncontrollable issues that arise when outsourcing to another country. Some which I will refer to are related to the enforcement and prosecution of perpertrators. For example: 1) in certain countries, there are no (or very weak laws) against the theft of "information." Mainly this is because the laws only relate to "tangible" items. 2) in certain countries, doing a background check on an applicant is almost impossible. 3) in certain countries, it is acceptable and commonplace to pay off police in lieu of prosecution. 4) in certain countries (and I know this is true in India) it could take as much as 20 years before a case goes to trial For the bank, it's the cost of doing business. And really, the losses are nothing compared to the money saved by outsourcing. I was anti outsourcing until one day I was riding in a car through the slums of Mumbai observing the extreme poverty that most of us could not comprehend. Then it dawned on me how outsourcing is important to young Indians. Seventh Magpie

Re:Pluses and Minuses of outsourcing

[Naum]

Then it dawned on me how outsourcing is important to young Indians

Problem with that statement is that those Indians who are benefiting from the tide of outsourcing, are not those in poverty, but the upper crust of a still rigid class society, that still adheres to the caste system, despite proclaimations to the contrary.

At least this has been the firsthand experience I've had in training offshore replacements -- that these folks were all mostly from rich, well-to-do families, and were sheltered from life, having to call a maintenance man to change a light bulb.

Re:Pluses and Minuses of outsourcing

[Seventh Magpie]

Naum,I agree with you 100%. In fact I thought about that while writing the post. But then I thought about Europe's "caste" system and how the industrial revolution created a middle class.

The fact that call centers have flourished in India will excel the high tech industry there. So I thoerize that eventually the rich kids will gravatate towards to management jobs once when opportunities are created, and the call center positions will trickle down to the less fortunate.

Sevent Magpie

There's something weird about the page linked to.

[windowpain]

It keeps reloading and reloading and reloading... I didn't have the patience to try to read the source to find out what it is. But it's creepy to hit the down arrow on your back button and see the same page listed halfway down your screen. WTF?

It's all relative...

[otter42]

The alleged perpetrators used the personal information of four NY-based clients to transfer ~$350,000 (Rs. 1.5 crores) in their names, a large sum in Indian currency.

I would have thought $350,000 is a large sum in ANY currency.

Brother, can you spare $350K?

Re:It's all relative...

[Hognoxious]

would have thought $350,000 is a large sum in ANY currency.

No, it's a large sum in dollars (by default one assumes US ones). See that S thing with the line through it?

Re:It's all relative...

[PureCreditor]

Try Turkey's *old* Lira - TRL -

1 USD = 1.35million TRL

so 350,000TRL = 26 cents

Re:It's all relative...

[jridley]

I would have thought $350,000 is a large sum in ANY currency.

It's a particularly *large* sum on the planet Triganic:

Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu.

(from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Re:It's all relative...

[mysticwhiskey]

One might think this sort of crazy inflation is bad, but surely it can lead to increased mathematical skills by the citizen when buying a loaf of bread? Or instead, maybe it goes like this:

Husband: "Hi honey, I made 23.456 million lira this week"

Wife: And what did you spend the rest on? Heh?

Re:It's all relative...

[Nept]

yes, but some places in india, one can buy a meal for equivalent of US nineteen cents.

Re:It's all relative...

[avida]

Remember the German currency back in the Nazi days? Totally worthless. You would burn the money rather than buy fuel with it.

Re:It's all relative...

[lightningrod220]

Heck, yeah, that's a lot of money! You could get a pretty nice stack of G5 PowerMacs and 30-inch LCD panels for that much!

I'm surprised this does not happen more often.

[neckdeepinspecialsau]

I once called a creditor of mine and was obviously routed to an overseas call center. The gentleman on the other end of the phone after asking me my issue asked me my social security number. I was hesitant to give it away to a guy in india making $.50 an hour but figured I was being paranoid. I gave him the number and he said please hold. The next thing I knew he put me on hold and I was transferred to another service representative (in the us) who also asked for my social security number. Well needless to say I let them have it basically "Why would they ask me for my social security number to transfer me?" I started checking my credit report and stopped doing business with the bank. Nothing came of it and I was being paranoid but the reality is this sort of thing can happen anywhere. At a restaurant you give the server your card. Most servers make low wages and they take your card off to the back room usually.

Re:I'm surprised this does not happen more often.

[Nimey]

I work in a US call center and that happens there too.

1) Customer calls in, we get SSN to bring up account.

2) Sometimes, customer must be transferred for various reasons. Ideally, the first rep will wait until the next rep picks up, then tell Rep 2 what info was given, but sometimes this doesn't happen and so the next rep has to start all over.

So..

[ASkGNet]

I really should update my account details in Citibank, as per the email that I got awhile ago.

They said my monies will be stoeled if I don't

Sigh....

[nberardi]

This brings into issue all the medical, supposidly confidental, data that gets sent to India for transscribing. I hope companies from around the world take a look at the amount of personal information they are sending to around the world with out thought of who might be watching it.

Re:Sigh....

[fabu10u$]

I once had a conversation with an Indian contractor about prior projects we had each worked on. He mentioned creating a system for an outsourcer that addressed the privacy question in this way: They chopped form images into pieces (each different field, if I remember right) and sent the pieces to different operators for entry. So one person would enter the first name, another the last name, etc.

Unfortunately for our article, chopping up customer service e-mails would render them unintelligible.

Re:Sigh....

[earthbound kid]

Yeah, good call. I'd much rather have a secretary who goes to the same church as my family typing up the results of an STD test report than some woman in India.

Re:Sigh....

[nberardi]

First of all why not have the doctor type it up? And most of the time STD tests are sent away for to a central testing company. So no worries with that.

Re:Sigh....

[Secrity]

"This brings into issue all the medical, supposidly confidental, data that gets sent to India for transscribing. I hope companies from around the world take a look at the amount of personal information they are sending to around the world with out thought of who might be watching it.

Corporations as a whole do not care at all about the personal data that they send anywhere; the data is simply a commodity. To companies that are used to dealing with large amounts of commodities (including personal information), the loss or compromise of a certain percentage of the commodity is tolerated and expected. For corporations it is cheaper to pay for the loss than it is to prevent the loss.

Re:Sigh....

[earthbound kid]

Doctors basically don't type anything. They dictate things and have transcriptions type things up for them. Meanwhile, if the testing is done by a "central testing company" then you have the exact same problem that you complained about in the first post-- you don't know who has your records!! Even if the company is based in America, that doesn't mean anything, since America has about as many crooks as any other country. More than its share, in fact.

The point is, in this case, the system worked, and the crooks were caught. In fact, it probably would have been harder to catch the crooks if they were in America, since it wouldn't have been flagged by the bank as a strange charge. Any time you're dealing with people you don't know, you have to have trust that they're not psychopaths who want to hurt you for no reason. Every time you buy a burger at McDonalds, you're trusting that the cashier won't just spaz out and run off with your $4.57. Every time you walk down the street, you're trusting that the person on the other side of the sidewalk isn't a serial killer with a gun just waiting to mow you down. We trust people we don't know, literally with our lives, everyday. In most cases that trust is warranted. In the occasional cases where the trust is betrayed, there should be a system in place to rectify those breaches of trust. And in this case, there was such a system, and it worked. You can complain about outsourcing all you want, but this case shows that while there is some danger of identity theft from outsourced firms, the threat isn't really so bad, since the criminals draw a bright line to themselves by virtue of their location.

Re:Sigh....

[glesga_kiss]

I hope companies from around the world take a look at the amount of personal information they are sending to around the world with out thought of who might be watching it.

Definataly. I'm seeing this from the other side. Here in the UK, your privacy is protected by the Data Protection Act, which states that companies cannot share your data with anyone without your permission.

For me, I only mostly deal with US companies, where there is no similar protection. In fact, things are so bad that the feeding tube parents sold the petition to marking agencies! Personally, I won't share my information with anyone in the US unless I absolutely can't avoid it and have checked out the companies history. Even then that means nothing as if they get taken over, it's all change.

Of course, fingerprinting people at customs means I can no longer enter the US either. So, you can imagine I'm reading all this Indian-bashing with a "pot calling kettle black" thought in my head.

Re:Sigh....

[TheGratefulNet]

mod this parent DOWN. he's dead wrong.

legally, international companies HAVE to care. legally. especially in places like europe (I know this isn't about euro in this case). but when personal info crosses borders, its a CRIME to let some info go across.

too bad the US doesn't have the same level of privacy concerns that most of euro does.

and with post-911 (sigh), we've cared even less about individual's privacy.

but back to the subject, the parent is wrong. corp's HAVE to care. if they let personal info cross borders in a country that CARES, they can be in big big trouble.

Re:Sigh....

[nberardi]

>> Every time you buy a burger at McDonalds, you're trusting that the cashier won't just spaz out and run off with your $4.57.

You are making a ton of frivilous points. If a guy at McDonalds runs away with 4.57 of my money he isn't going to ruin my credit and prevent me from getting future loans. At least if the company is in the U.S. it is more easily dealt with and credit services are more willing to reverse the credit history, because U.S. law is backing the credit service and if they don't a judge in the U.S. handling the case and order that the credit services all reverse the damages.

Can't do that if the records are on foreign soil and the court is on foreign soil.

Re:Sigh....

[earthbound kid]

If someone in a foreign country screws you, yes it's easier for them to get away with it, but it's also easier for you to prove it's not your fault. Just point out that the charge was made to deliver a bunch of awesome stuff to Dehli and that your passport hasn't been stamped by India, and the credit card companies will buy your story and let you off. Credit history restored; problem solved, as far as you care.

If you say that you were ripped off by an American, and all the awesome stuff just happened to be sent to a PO box down the street, that's when the credit card companies are less likely to believe you and leave your credit history in a bad state.

Re:Begin the racist rants

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I choose to?

It's not important that the scammers were Indian, it is important that employees of an outsourced company were perpetrators of a crime.

I also happen to have my own startup which has an offshore branch - personally, I'd be scared if personal client information were to be misused.

The one reason I did post the Indian part is because I'm hoping that this would get a lot of publicity, and Indian offices would smarten up to such acts by their employees. If you hear about one, you can be assured that there are many more that you don't.

Offshoring and outsourcing is a big thing for India and Indian companies need to take that seriously. If an employee is able to garner significant personal information of clients, then they aren't doing a good job of it.

The only way for them to get that message if this were to get publicity - and business of the said company were to suffer a significant loss for people to send a strong message that they need to do something about this sort of thing.

Bad publicity affects business, and money speaks strongest.

Re:Begin the racist rants

[heavy_metal_chemist]

I still don't see how this is an indian issue or even an outsourcing issue. There are crooks in India, there are crooks in the US. If US call-centres were held to a higher standard, perhaps I could understand the point but selling client information and problems with insecure storage of data are universal.

But security threats are multi-faceted

[Superdad]

Do the editors really need to emphasise that the scammers were indian? I don't want to sound naive but do the editors really want to turn this site into a populist racist forum?

Security is a 'system', and altering or extending a system, can open it to risk that were not originally envisaged when it was established. Adding a new site, adding additional computer systems, new network(s), new operative etc all can alter the security threat mix.

Extending a secure system to a new country, a new language group, a new multi-cultural mix, will also expose the system to a new mix of threats. Ths issue of extending such a system to a different continent, particularly if the operatives there are working at the higher(est) levels, entails exposing the system to all the differences between the new location and the old.

Whether the staff are physically in India or hold Indian state passports is incidental. The significant factors are, a) how close or removed they are from the cultural assumptions of the systems designers, b) how exposed they are to personal weakness, c) how exposed they are to external influence. These are sometimes referred to as Antipathy, Jealousy, Poverty, and Corruption. Placing a call centre in Dehli, Amritsar or Goa would vary the mix, as would placing it in Belfast, Glasgow or Ipswitch.

Wrong link!!

[earthbound kid]

Parent got the link to Citibank wrong! Here is the correct link:

http://www.citibank.com/

(Just kidding. Don't click that link. It's a joke.)

Re:Wrong link!!

[borum]

The domains been suspended for a while now :)

How do you know? /K

What's the news???

[doktorstop]

Looks like a slow day for Slashot if this type of stories get posted =)

According to the police, Thomas, who worked in the callcentre for six months before quitting the job in December 2004, had the secret pincodes of the customers' e-mail IDs, which were used to transfer money. In January, he roped in his friends and transferred money from four accounts of the bank's New York-based customers into their own accounts, opened under fictitious names.

The story doesn't even have enough info to classify it as social engineering. People used confidential information to transfet funds. Ok, they used the Internet to do the transfer. Ok, they got PINs from customer emails. What's in there to learn? Where are the "news for nerds" here?

Re:Begin the racist rants

[kubrick]

'Ivan Samuel Thomas' doesn't sound like an Indian name... but that could just be my racist background showing (?).

Re:Begin the racist rants

[heavy_metal_chemist]

No need to get insulting. Perhaps my argument was too subtle. If people in outsourced firms sell data and people in US firms sell client data what does outsourcing have to do with anything. I am against outsourcing for other reasons but insinuating that indian firms are less trustworthy is a bogus claim.

Or interfering with the democratic process

[Moderation abuser]

Piracy in the UK:

Unlimited fine and 10 years in prison.

Vote rigging in the UK:

Unlimited fine and 2 years in prison...

e.g.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/4 406575.stm

Re:Or interfering with the democratic process

[badfish99]

Mind you, piracy in the UK had the death penalty as recently as 1998, although it was abolished for murder in 1969. See History of Capital Punishment

Re:Or interfering with the democratic process

[Gridpoet]

Ummm...i think when he says piracy, in this instance he actually means the hook-handed-parrot-carring-wooden-leg-having-one-e yed ARRRRGGHHH kind...

hoist the Jolly Rodger!

Re:Or interfering with the democratic process

[jridley]

Right, he means piracy.

The other posts are talking about copyright infringement, an act which has been mislabeled by the RIAA et al as "piracy" in order to make it sound horrible.

Re:Or interfering with the democratic process

[SamSim]

Dude, piracy in that article means, like, attacking a ship and killing people and stealing their stuff. Which at least makes some kind of sense to have the death penalty for. Not copying music.

Re:Or interfering with the democratic process

[squiggleslash]

...and those bastards who write the dictionaries are in on it too. It's a conspiracy I tell you, a conspiracy! Why I bet all the documents that were published before the RIAA was even created that used these terms are plants!

Re:Revenge of the outsourcers

[DenDave]

heck and people said Indians were stealing our jobs...

Once bitten

[StormyWeather]

not so shy

Finally...

[Bloodlent]

The Indian outsource workers fight back after everyone mocking them on Slashdot! Watch out, next they might steal your job...oh, wait.

Well that explains a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

I own a a company in Europe and part of one in ****.

I ordered products from the **** company and transfered the money to them from Citibank by telephone banking.

I had a call back from Citibank, an 'anti-money laundering' call to check the purpose of the money transfer requesting the telephone number of the **** company to receive the money.

A day later the ***** company receives a call asking for wholesale pricing information from a Indian company that competes with me to the FINANCIAL CONTROLLERS telephone number, not the usual secretaries number.

How did they get that number?

Re:Well that explains a lot

[Bedouin X]

Maybe they asked somebody?

Re:Well that explains a lot

[YetAnotherAnonymousC]

They got it from ***** in ******. Duh!

Re:Well that explains a lot

[Intron]

So you suspect the 'anti-money laundering' call was actually a side venture on the part of some Citibank employees? Or maybe they sold your information to someone, or even a misuse of information by Citibank itself? Did you ask Citibank for confirmation that the call was legit?

Re:Well that explains a lot

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

Caller ID.

Re:Well that explains a lot

[Atryn]

I had a call back from Citibank, an 'anti-money laundering' call to check the purpose of the money transfer requesting the telephone number of the **** company to receive the money.

I never provide any sensitive information to any entity on an INBOUND call. I completely confused a poor Discover rep once when they called and needed to verify something and I refused to give them my information to verify myself as the account owner. I asked them for a department name and reference ID of some sort so I could call my number for Discover and get transferred to them.

Seriously, someone calls you and says they are from your financial institution and need info??? Yeah, right.

In the case of Discover, it was legit. Call me crazy, but its a precaution and extra 15 minutes of trouble I'm willing to take.

Re:Well that explains a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a private number I don't give out. They identify themselves before the call by giving you details of the money transfer you asked for.

So its not a blind call.

Re:Well that explains a lot

[Buran]

They were confused? They should be expecting and encouraging that sort of thing!

Re:Well that explains a lot

[AJWM]

You know, I'm sure, that Caller ID can be faked.

Re:Well that explains a lot

[DavidTC]

Nonono.

You do a financial transfer, giving your money to someone else, and giving the bank a phone number.

They call that number, asking you to confirm using some secret code, after they tell you the details of the transaction just ordered

Yes, in theory, someone could fake a call from them...if they called at exactly the right time, and somehow knew the details of a transaction you had ordered.

There are plenty of insecure systems out there...that's not one of them. Giving out passwords to incoming calls is dumb, giving out passwords to callbacks you just ordered is not, especially when they have details you just gave them.

Re:Well that explains a lot

[2old2rockNroll]

They were confused? They should be expecting and encouraging that sort of thing!

Not really. I've had several such calls asking if I just authorized whomever in this city to charge $xxx.xx. They already have the information. A yes or no answer doesn't give away anything they don't know already.

Re:Well that explains a lot

[Buran]

Ah, sorry for the confusion. I should have been more specific -- I referred to calls that asked for information that could be used for ID theft. The kind of call you mean isn't a problem.

I wish they'd did that before I suddenly found myself out $800! (Thankfully, lots of yelling at the bank and at the thieving companies who helped themselves to my credit got refunds back, but it should not have taken a month!)

What's wrong with the heart of Citibank? Read on

[Anonymous Coward]

Although this particular sort of naive fraud is unlikely to repeated for a while at Citibank, Citibank has a history of association with much more sophisticated and serious fraudulent activity. I refer to Citibank's crucial role in suggesting, creating, structuring, and maintaining the complex banking and hedging schemes for both Enron and WorldCom. Forget the Enron and WorldCom directors for a moment. The Citibank directors who were involved should be held accountable for their contribution to the frauds and yet they have all somehow managed to evade proper censure; indeed they still hold company office - that's absolutely not right. The SEC and AG have done nothing with any of them. Let's avoid using Citibank and let's see why they they get away with their activities...

Some background on Citibank's unresolved history of association with serious fraud:

here
and
here

Advertising Irony

[jujuchef]

Anyone else see the irony with the citibank advertisement smacked right in the middle of the story? Even if the story doesn't identify them, bad publicity is still publicity.

Ha! The joke's on all you now!

[sgant]

And they laughed at me when I said I was going to just bury my money in a jar in the backyard!

Only now I forgot exactly where I buried it.

Re:dissed...

[Ogman]

Blaming the customer...isn't that already standard practice for all business???

Re:Begin the racist rants

[Hognoxious]

'Ivan Samuel Thomas' doesn't sound like an Indian name...

Many customers are (rightly or wrongly) against offshoring and so Indian call-centre employees often use English-sounding pseudonyms. Some companies go as far as briefing their drones on the weather, football & soap-operas. Some can even put on regional accents.

Editors Doin' It For Themselves

[Surak_Prime]

"While the name of the bank has not been revealed, the article indicates that the bank in question is Citibank."

Don't know about you, but that seems kind of "revealed", to me, doesn't it to you? I think the folks running Slashdot say stuff like this just to generate additional conversation about how wrong it is!

Congrats. Stupid comment of the day

[Anonymous Coward]

"If money was transferred illegitimately from a US customer to somewhere in the US, it would be much harder to figure out what was going on than if it was being sent to India."

Right. Because its so much easier for the FBI to trace money in India than in the U.S. Do you even think things through a *little* before you post?

That ranks up there with the stupidest things I've read in about 3 weeks.

Re:"What kind of name is Pune?"

[blakespot]

Yes, it was a joke (that you clearly didn't get)... And the name is actually spelled "Poon" I believe. And hey, give me a break, my car just hit a water buffalo.

blakespot

Re:"What kind of name is Pune?"

[ggvaidya]

???!!!

Outsourcing IS part of the problem

[pandrijeczko]

$350,000 is a menial sum compared to some of the huge fraud that happens in the Western World (just look at Worldcom as an example).

However, outsourcing to people in less developed parts of the world means that much smaller (and presumably more "readily available") sums of money can provide them with a very good living still & make committing fraud worthwhile in the firstplace.

There are no intended racial overtones in these comments, just observations, and quite frankly it's the mega-corporations I laugh at now that they will start to get their "just desserts" for messing up the economies and lives of so many people for the sake of a few bucks.

Let's face it, if you're a Citibank (if that's who it is) customer that got ripped off by this, you'll get your money back anyway because it's obviously a security issue with the bank themselves, not the customer's fault.

I say good luck to the Indian call centre workers - they're being used as the 21st century equivalent of sweatshop labourers anyway so they should grab what they can before they demand too high wages and they themselves get dumped by the corporations like a lot of the rest of us have.

[INSERT LOUD SCORNING "HA! HA!" HERE]

Re:Outsourcing IS part of the problem

[houghi]

However, outsourcing to people in less developed parts of the world means that much smaller (and presumably more "readily available") sums of money can provide them with a very good living still & make committing fraud worthwhile in the firstplace.

There are a LOT of call centers in Ireland and I would not call Ireland a less developed country. However the money these people make is extremely low compared to the cost of living.

From what I hear the Indian agents make a good living compared the the cost of living and are if you compare the cost of living have a better life then their Irish counterparts.

If you give me 350.000USD, I can have very good living, thank you. My citibank number is in Belgium 953-8294612-87 (953 is the bank. 87 is the checksum. Figure it out if it is real or not. :-)

Re:Outsourcing IS part of the problem

[karlowfwb]

The effect that outsourcing is having on India is indeed widening the socio-economic gap over there, but do you know who is coming out on top? All the Indian "sweat shop" laborers whom you seem to think are being taken advantage of.

Re:Outsourcing IS part of the problem

[Rodney L Caston]

Wow.. your rant was ripped right out of the Michael Moore''s handbook how to start controversy without providing any real factual data to back it up.

Just rhetoric and moveon.org flavored flamies. ... good job! ... remember, everytime you use the word 'corporation' in your rants, you need to say it with a mean sneer.. example: "The Corrrrrporations!"

Re:Outsourcing IS part of the problem

[mOdQuArK!]

your rant was ripped right out of the Michael Moore''s handbook how to start controversy without providing any real factual data to back it up.

I think you meant the handbook of every single right-wing talk radio host. Moore's a total amateur compared to the neocon spin machine.

The real Horror in all of this. - When will it end

[Ada_Rules]

I think most people here are really missing the point of this story. Up until now, the only jobs that were being outsourced to India were call centers, software engineers and a few other white collar jobs.

With this event, something much more serious has taken place. We have begun to outsource criminal activity. Oh the horror. What about the children of the criminals in the US? Where will they get their crack money?

This is very serious. We need to act now to prevent tossing away the lives of those in the US who have worked sometimes for their entire lives committing crime. While it might be possible for an engineer or call center employee to be retrained for a new job, we have lots of experience that says we are not very good at retraining out crimininals. After all, there are only so many CEO positions available in the US.

How was this a hack?

[Thaelon]

They got the account info from the users, presumably over the phone, then used it. It's more like plain old thievery than hacking.

Pot calling the kettle...

[ImaLamer]

Really I didn't say "Indian" (you did) because it's not the problem. I don't have a problem with _any_ group. For god sakes, I'm a liberal, why would _I_ play the terrorism trump card?

Really my beef is this: I don't trust foreign workers at American companies overseas. I'd trust an Indian computer company with my credit card before I'd trust a support tech from the UK who works for HP (hypothetical).

Just because they are foreign, it doesn't automatically make them a potential terrorist for christs sake.

No, but you've got to admit it would be easier for Osama to walk into an Indian call center and get a job than a "western" one.

i've worked with a number of consultants from India on coding projects here in the UK and have found them to be nothing but exceptionally dedicated, meticulous and hard working.

So I can use that to make a projection about any other Indian I come across? Isn't that prejudice...? It's hard to fixate on one stereotype because do I believe yours or someone else's?

Anyways I should have said *all* not *any*... and be suspect of *all* if *any*...?

Re:Pot calling the kettle...

[pi4arctan1guy]

No, but you've got to admit it would be easier for Osama to walk into an Indian call center and get a job than a "western" one.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Osama strongly disliked in India?

Re:Pot calling the kettle...

[mrsev]

Indian=brown skin + beard
Bin Laden=brown skin + beard
therefore
Indian=Bin Laden
QED

I dont think that Bin Laden needs a job in an Indian call center!

Re:Pot calling the kettle...

[xilet]

There are liberals in congress? I see democrats but no liberals.

Re:Pot calling the kettle...

[LaCosaNostradamus]

Well, terminology-wise, you got me there. If the Congress has no liberals, just Democrats and left-leaning Republicans that we call "liberals", then I stand corrected.

Re:Pot calling the kettle...

[xilet]

Sorry just being anal retentive and cynical. =)

What no one's pointed out.

[Anonymous Coward]

What no one's pointed out is that the much maligned Indian police swung into action rather quickly and all accused have been arrested. But no, we're trying to highlight some other facts here. All's well that ends well? And these guys got caught because, let's face it, they were too naive to think they could get away with it. It's darn stupid, never mind the nationality. I doubt we would have seen this story around here if someone sitting in California would have done such a thing. In which case the amount in question would have been much higher as well - while an "evil greedy" Indian is happy a few hundred thousand dollars, I'm sure the American "evil greedy" counterpart would be talking in millions of USD. Reason FOR outsourcing #65241 A "greedy evil" Indian steals less money than their "greedy evil" American counterparts.

Just some useful info for call center testing

[syntap]

I have an Indian guy in my office, and I got him to make a list of several very offensive curses in his native language. If I suspect I'm on the line with someone in India that is faking a name and accent, I play along for a bit and then say something on the list (I have no idea what they mean). A lot of times the American accent breaks down and I hear some yelling but it appears to be an effective litmus test. An American on the line just says "huh? cell phone going out?"

Re:Just some useful info for call center testing

[Legion303]

List them, you tease.

Re:Just some useful info for call center testing

[radish]

Excellent - insulting people in foreign languages. Way to improve US/ROW relations!

Maybe instead you should try some nice compliments, learn to say "Thanks, Goodbye" in Hindi or something. You'll likely get the same amount of information back, but your Karma will improve, and you'll get an overall sense of well being. There's also less chance said call center person will take the credit card number you just gave them and buy a new car with it.

Re:Just some useful info for call center testing

[syntap]

Oh, but I do say goodbye in Hindi before I hang up... I don't want to be totally rude!

Nail on the head!

[ImaLamer]

What connection do local call centres have with a banks customers that people who live further don't? ...

it's cheaper than giving it to a `fellow American`. I should have thought that were obvious.


A Ha, and you've discovered my complaint. We get paid a lot more, we have less motivation to steal. We depend on that job, we have built a life around it. The paychecks are okay, so the risk to benefit ratio tells me not to steal from customers. On top of that, they are fellow countrymen.

However, in India it is a different story (don't flame, just an example).

The Indian worker is getting paid a fraction of what you've just spent. I sure hope there was no contempt in your voice - contempt breeds contempt. The tech looks at his check and sees a nice amount of money but he sees another option. Really, if he loses this job there will be another American company who will come around (best part is, they don't talk to each other). We've created the economic situation where it makes sense to work for a few weeks and rip a few hundred people off. An organized effort could be dangerous.

No matter... bring the work home and solve the whole problem that way.

Re:Nail on the head!

[Elminst]

The Indian worker is getting paid a fraction of what you've just spent.

And here is the fallacy in your argument.
That indian tech may be getting a fraction of what YOU make per year. But, he is getting MANY TIMES as much as as the average Indian worker. Wealth is RELATIVE to your PEERS. Read any news story on outsourced workers and you see that they have some of the best living and working conditions in their country. Some even better than a lot of American workers.
And who says that Indian guy doesn't depend on his job? Why couldn't he have built a life around it? Just because they make fewer "American" dollars than you do, doesn't mean they're poor or any less deserving of what they have.

Everything is cheaper over there. The cost of living is way lower. This is why companies move their business there. They can pay him half what you make, and he still makes 3x as much as the next INDIAN worker.

Stop making the same WRONG argument that less american $$ = less skilled or less dedicated to one's job.

There was more contempt in your post than in its parent. You could do the SAME crime working as a first level hell-desk worker in the states. But I guess that would be okay because you "brought that work home."

Re:Nail on the head!

[vertinox]

And who says that Indian guy doesn't depend on his job? Why couldn't he have built a life around it? Just because they make fewer "American" dollars than you do, doesn't mean they're poor or any less deserving of what they have.

Same reason why US CEO's steal millions of dollars from their companies and stockholders. It seems they have more money that all of us, but still need more. But they go to jail too... Just ask Martha Stewart and WorldCom CEO's. It's just human nature.

Re:Nail on the head!

[Samrobb]

And here is the fallacy in your argument.
That indian tech may be getting a fraction of what YOU make per year. But, he is getting MANY TIMES as much as as the average Indian worker.

And here's the fallacy in your argument - that same difference in pay scale/cost of living means that the $350K US that they made off with was worth a whole heck of a lot more to them than it would be to you.

Would I risk something like this for 10 years' salary? Nope.

Would I risk something like this for 50 years' salary? I'd like to think no, but I've never been tempted like this...

Would I risk something like this for for more money than I could otherwise reasonably expect to earn in my lifetime? Maybe. Imagine yourself in a situation where a few minutes effort would net you $10 million of someone else's money. Can you be sure that you wouldn't consider that at all tempting?

I'm not sure where these guys ended up on that scale, but I suspect that you're still talking about enough money to live comfortably for 20-30 years. The cynical part of me says that their real problem was that they didn't steal enough. If it had been a few hundred million, then they wouldn't be thieves, just international market speculators...

Re:Nail on the head!

[Tablizer]

You imply that trading with the US is the only way to lift the country out of poverty. They could do that by losening up their internal economy instead. India is over-regulated. Being a US parasite is not the only way out of poverty.

Re:Nail on the head!

[Austerity Empowers]

The problem with your argument is that companies do not move their businesses over there at all, they just hire employees at arms length and pay them at cut rate, but still keep their businesses in the US. The OWNERS and EXECUTIVES don't want to go to India, it sucks there, and can be dangerous. It's far away from their family, friends, banks, wall street, etc. To them India is a cheap people farm. They're not investing in India, they're not trying to build it up as an industrial or business superpower, they're just using it and if it gets expensive they'll find another impovrished country to bully. Meanwhile jobs are taken away from American workers in their own country. The same country whose taxes fund a legal system, military and police force which allows them to retain their money (be it real estate, investments or liquid cash). The same country were the average guy will have to go fight in a war to protect their business interests at pretty much their own whim. In some of the countries they are using for cheap labor, each executive, owner or investment company has enough in LIQUID cash to feed a city for years, don't tell me that their governments would try hard to find someone who in fact stole their money should it have been placed overseas. This person only got caught because he stole so little and stole from an American bank. If it was the First Bank of Nowhere India, who knows what would have happened. No I don't give a rats ass about the average Indian, but unless India wants to pledge itself as a commonwealth of the US I don't have to. They're on their own. In my opinion US companies should not be allowed to use their labor. Those companies need to stand on their own, and sell their services (properly tariffed) to US companies. The government could then control the cost of living in the US with respect to other places and reduce it slowly, which I think is probably necessary. Watching so much of this contries technical experience get outsourced only makes me wonder if we'll be able to do anything locally in the US in 20 years except make bad music and TV and change bedpans.

Re:Nail on the head!

[winwar]

"I'm not backing this crime. I think it's just because of opportunity and human greed - could've happened anywhere - it has got nothing to do with outsourcing to India."

True, but would 12 people in the US have been as likely to do this crime? That would net each of them just under 30k each? Maybe a little over a years salary.

I have no doubt someone might try. But don't think outsourcing has nothing to do with it.

Re:Nail on the head!

[pipingguy]

Would I risk something like this for for more money than I could otherwise reasonably expect to earn in my lifetime? Maybe. Imagine yourself in a situation where a few minutes effort would net you $10 million of someone else's money. Can you be sure that you wouldn't consider that at all tempting?

That reminded me of a Twilight Zone(?) episode where the following dialog takes place (stolen from a website):

"...a dark stranger brings a box to a man's door, promising wealth if he only presses a button on the top. As he is about to do just that, the dark stranger says, "if you press the button, someone you don't know will die."

The man debates it for a while, and then presses the dark stranger's button. The dark stranger hands the man his reward, and turns to leave, box in hand. As he leaves the man asks, "Where is the box headed now?"

The dark stranger replies, "Oh, I'm just taking it to someone you don't know."

Re:Citibank Outsourcing - Exclusivity ?

[vluther]

Thats exactly the problem though. If you are willing to work for $22/hr. You need to get a job with TCS first, and then get sent to Citi. Now it's a lot like going to work a staffing firm based in the US, who has a contract with another company in the US...

How easy is it for you to get a job with TCS if you are already based in America ? Not very easy. Plus if a company like USAA and Citibank have given exclusive contracts to TCS, then it makes it extremely hard for local recruiting agencies and talent to get the job. How come every company that has a contract with TCS ends up having 20-30 new indian contractors ? Something needs to be done about these exclusive contracts, and TCS needs to be told to first look for local talent. I know lots of people who have lowered their rates, just to compete with the Indians, but these exclusive contracts to companies who naturally are averted to experienced local candidates (can't exploit them as well), needs to be changed.

PS: I am an indian immigrant myself, I moved here when I was 13. And, I am competing for my job with classmates I had in India. I'm not racist or a bigot. I haven't lost my job to an outsourcing firm etc, but thats because I rarely work for large firms that can afford outsourcing in the first place.

It doesn't supprise me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Having recently returned from India, one of the biggest things I found was that almost everyone was trying to find a way to part you with your money. Strangely enough, the only place that this wasn't true was in the area near Pakistan (the desert) where the only industry is tourism and the most important need is water.

Leading up to our trip, everyone told us to watch out for pick-pockets. We did not find this to be common. Of course, there were countless people who are willing to tell you anything, including flat-out lies, to take your money.

Re:It doesn't supprise me...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only difference between what you just described and the western world is in the methods used.

Re:It doesn't supprise me...

[radish]

People ask me for money every day as I travel to and from work. A few times a week some company will cold call me and attempt to part me from my money. My inbox is full of spam and phishing emails trying to get me to give away my money - knowingly or otherwise. There are probably people working in the call centers of my bank selling my details to criminals.

I live in New York, one of the richest cities in the world.

Re:It doesn't supprise me...

[sanity_slipping]

Of course, there were countless people who are willing to tell you anything, including flat-out lies, to take your money.

See? There ARE drawbacks to Americanizing the whole world!

Re:It doesn't supprise me...

[Archimboldo]

I don't suppose you could give me $200 ?

Certainly, sir. Before I can complete that transaction I need your social security number.

Re:It doesn't supprise me...

[HungWeiLo]

Speaking of parting people with their money - I was quoted a $400 hotel room in Bangalore last week. It was not too long ago that I stayed at the Bellagio for about that much.

US companies are getting their eyes gouged out over there. After the 20-25% labor savings, "little" things here and there make CIOs everywhere scramble to creatively write off these "miscellaneous" offshoring expenses.

Re:Begin the racist rants

[skahshah]

What about Georges Fernandes (former minister), Ivan Dias (archbishop of Mumbai), etc ?

Company as much to blame as well IMO

[number6ebf]

From the linked article: Msource, told TNN: "It is an unfortunate thing to happen. However, the arrested people are not on our rolls now." I think that Msource should try and make sure that they are hiring trustworthy people. I know that here in the states that they do background investigations on people that handle sensitive information. Is this done in India as well? Apparently not. I also find Msources' attitude on the matter somewhat cavalier. "The perpetrators no longer work for us so it is not our problem" is how I read the quote from Msource above. Maybe as more incidents like this occur overseas US companies will finally realize that you simply can't send your most important data to the lowest bidder.

Re:Citibank Outsourcing - Exclusivity ?

[Schnapple]

I haven't lost my job to an outsourcing firm etc, but thats because I rarely work for large firms that can afford outsourcing in the first place.

There's the part about offshore outsourcing people miss. The biggest corporations are the ones trying it. Your smaller organizations mostly aren't. It's ironic since it's the largest organizations are the only ones who can afford it. They're the ones with tasks that can be placed in a box, sent overseas, completed, and then sent back.

I hate offshore outsourcing probably more than anyone here, but this is a bank. These are the institutions that came up with the idea of automating most teller tasks with an ATM machine and then charging you for using it (and then patting themselves on the back when they don't) IMO, banks are bad places to work right now, mostly since a lot of them are still on mainframes. You've got a huge system with a need for a lot of programmers on archaic old languages. The programmers you do have are retiring and dying. The new programmers don't want to do it - they want to learn J2EE and .NET. Rewrite the system in flavor-of-the-month language? Or just send the work to India where they jump at the chance to work with it and will do so for a smaller wage?

The irony is that I was given a raise and promoted thanks to the fact that the bullshit scripting task I was originally hired for was offshored to India. But I still don't trust it as far as I can throw it.

A New Low

[Das Auge]

Now they're outsourcing our crimes!

Lakh of knowledge

[musakko]

They allegedly transferred a total of Rs 1.5 crore (US $3.5 lakh) from a multinational bank

Glad they explained how much was stolen in such clear terms. The value of the US lakh isn't what it used to be anyway..

HACK?

[davidpmacdonald]

It's a pitty that slashdot would title this "Indian Call Center Employees Hack US Bank Accounts". It appears that these people took note of certain accounts as the account owners phoned into the call centre. To me this is little more than common theft; there was no insight into the operation of a system. And as far as Social engineering is concerned these people were supposed to be dealing with people's accounts and obtaining relevant information. This amounts to nothing more than a bad employee being hired and taking advantage of their position.

I expected slashdot to at least notice this!

Re:HACK?

[glesga_kiss]

It's a pitty that slashdot would title this "Indian Call Center Employees Hack US Bank Accounts".

You must be new here. Slashdot is very racist towards certain countries, mostly the ones that aren't white. ANY discussion on Indian outsourcing spends it's life bordering between flaming and trolling. The fact is, more people read this article because of the incendary title than would have without it, so you can expect this kind of thing to continue.

The headline "Call centre employees note down inforation to illegally access accounts" would not have got many readers. So, throw in "hack" and "Indian Call Centre" and bang, you have 200+ comments within an hour or two.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Begin the racist rants

[MoeDrippins]

"Then the New York Times article, titled "We're From Bangalore (But We're Not Allowed To Tell You)" revealed all. Indian call centers now had to acquire American accents and generic Anglo names..."

From http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=10048

$22/hr

[Barbarian]

No, $22 per hour is what the company, TCS, charges Citibank per employee.

404?

[tvh2k]

Hmm I keep getting "404 Page not found", perhaps they're overloaded with password changes? I found this great alternate site to change passwords here: https://www2.citibank.com/chpass. Don't tell anyone though, we don't want this one crashing too.

Re:Begin the racist rants

[zakezuke]

Absolutely, one should identify country of origin

Totally... it will promote awareness to watch out for wire transfers from specific places if bank fraud is on a rise there. I don't care if it's India, Belgium, or Luxemburg. Mexico was hot on the fraud charts for a short period of time, and my was nice enough to phone me and ask me about a few trivial charges from there. Given I don't travel there often it was a legit concern.

When ever I watch the news, the stories almost always have a region associated with them. It in it self is hardly racist.

You're only looking at the little picture

[HangingChad]

The little picture is some entry level droid in an Indian call center skimming credit cards. Whoopee-do, that could happen anyway.

What amazes me is that no one seems to care what foreign governments could do with all that information on US citizens. And they could afford the really juicy data analysis tools and have the resources to build very detailed dossiers on every American. Much like Homeland Security is doing by using private data aggregators.

Well, come to think of it I'm not sure I trust the Indian or Chinese government any less than DHS.

Re:You're only looking at the little picture

[glesga_kiss]

What amazes me is that no one seems to care what foreign governments could do with all that information on US citizens. And they could afford the really juicy data analysis tools and have the resources to build very detailed dossiers on every American.

You do know that Echelon is in fact real, and the UK/USA has been doing exactly that for at least ten years?

Though, I have to wonder why the Chinese government might want to compile data on a random American citizen. They already have dossiers on everyone they are interested in; that's how inteligence works. Just as their is a file named "George Bush" in Bejing, guaranteed Langly has a few files on the important Chinese people.

Well, come to think of it I'm not sure I trust the Indian or Chinese government any less than DHS.

I'm certain I don't trust DHS. Look how Iraqi intel was manipulated to justify a war of profit. How hard would it be to justify a trip to Camp X-Ray for anyone that they wanted rid of? The form of inteligence practiced recently is similar to seeing shapes in the clouds. If you look hard enough, you'll see what you want to see.

Since the introduction of fingerprint scanners at US airports, most privacy advocates are refusing to visit.

Outsourcing Of America..

[Anonymous Coward]

It is time to not berate the concept of Outsourcing. We created the Internet, the Communications Network and now we reap the benefits. We Have decided to find the cheapest and best ways to maximize profits That is the Capitalist Model. Criminal activity has and shall always be a part of doing business. You create organizations like the SEC to monitor and police. But when society (The Seasoned Capitalist) clamours for Small Government then be prepared to face the consequences. Unfortunately when we get to taste our own recipes we dont necessarily like it. It has always been the case the last 500 years, that Europe and the US have been able to dictate terms to the rest of the world and when they dont anticipate how things are going to play out they quietly change or withdraw. Unfortunately for them The next 100 years are going to be tumutous as 2 plus billions in China and India shall be in a position to dictate terms we may not like and may have to either retract or create the myth of how Bad "THEY" are. Lets see if we as a society can play by the rules we created but now dont like.

Why Outsourcing is Cheaper?

[affinity]

Because you don't have to pay them. They pay themselves via your own customers.

I wonder if this will change the policies/practices of HIPPA compliant organizations/companies.

Re:Why Outsourcing is Cheaper?

[DS_User]

All I have to say sweet irony. I guess Corporate America should have learned by now that if you treat your workers like $#!+ they will do $#!+ to you no matter where they are from.

Re:Begin the racist rants

[tezza]

It is borderline racist, as you mention.

I'm also a little disgraced at slashdot, and some of the responses. Can you not see that this topic, and the way it was introduced is clearly a FUD campaign?? Instead of the pinup child of linux as the target, we have the less popular Indian employee. I have even seen comments saying I hope the CEOs and PHBs take notice. You should maybe try and motivate these people to start consuming fact and not reacting to fear, u & d.

If anything the Russian mafia should be complaining that their lucrative internet fraud network is being outsourced.

Re:The real Horror in all of this. - When will it

[Legion303]

"there are only so many CEO positions available in the US."

And only one "President of the United States" position.

Shoulda used US prisons

[couch_warrior]

How dare they outsource to *foreign* criminals, when they could have outrsourced to US criminals like most credit card companies do ...http://www.unicor.gov/services/

India?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having recently returned from India, one of the biggest things I found was that almost everyone was trying to find a way to part you with your money...Of course, there were countless people who are willing to tell you anything, including flat-out lies, to take your money.

You sure that was India, and not Washington DC?

Re:Obviously?

[pommiekiwifruit]

Caucasian.

Liechtenstein

[RedLaggedTeut]

Maybe they(banks) should outsource their call centers to Liechtenstein then, because it will be much easier to figure out who of the 25,000 inhabitants was the culprit, than to figure out who of the 295,835,000 US americans was it .

Monitoring required

[LucBorg]

Although I do agree with your point that it is so easy to trace because of the fact that it was outsourced, but I must say that this sort of day-light robbery is more likely to happen when people are far away and think that they can get away with it, as staff at outsourcing firms are.

I believe that the integrity of those that are employed for outsourcing contracts must be one of the first things to consider before letting them handle sensitive account information. This sort of thing has not happened to a great extent in other countries, dare I say, in the West.

Outsourcing can only be bad for the countries that are doing the outsourcing. Skills are transferred from these countries to countries like India, and then the experience and know-how is lost from the countries in which they were developed. It all comes down to costs, and basically western currencies allow you to buy less in the west than it does in developing countries. Why is this? I believe it is because the West is just too capitalist. Eastern capitalism is probably better, because it means that everything costs a lot less, so western countries pay people in the east much less money than they would have to pay europeans or americans, and get the same work done. If things here were cheaper, then people here could be paid less as well, and the need for outsourcing would just disappear.

Do Citibank PR read Slashdot?

[weierstrass]

Do they hold down user id's that are only used for astroturfing? (And disguising astroturfing?)
Does Microsoft?
Do IBM?
Of course. They would be in dereliction of duty not to. It's one of the web's most important fora. And anyone can have their $0.02.
Are they getting ready to respond to stories such as these even before they have entered the Mysterious Future?

accountability and jurisprudence

[unk1911]

i was never a big fan of outsourcing because it takes jobs away from us but i always thought it was strange to outsource critical tasks abroad because how do you find people accountable for their actions when things go wrong, if they live in another country? it definitely gets tricky, whether the errors were intentional (to undermine us) or accidental. just imagine outsourcing the writing of our defense software to another country..

--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com

To add to the paranoia

[beforewisdom]

It is tax season in the US.

H&R Block outsources much of its tax prep.

Same deal. The work is being done, with your personal information, a hemisphere away, by people who are not bound by our laws.

Re:Just a matter of time

[MagicBox]

All HAIL OUTSOURCING. Just imagine this: I live in a POOR country, grew up without clothes on my back, had nothing all my life, still have nothing. A western company comes along. They still pay me $hit (because the reason they're in my country is to save money in the 1st place). I can buy bread, but I am still poor. This bank opens up their customer's accounts to me A battle in now brewing inside of my head: Do I stay a poor slave, or take a chance at the HIGH life. My good side (If I have one) is saying: No, don't do it.....it's wrong.
But the gravity is much stronger on the other side. I've been poor and unfed all my life......living in a place where being in jail could mean I get fed at least daily.....WHAT DO I HAVE TO LOSE?!?!?! Welcome to the beginning of the END

AdWords Snafu

[telstar]

I like the fact that there's a big Citibank add embedded in the page with this story suggesting that I open up a Citibank account. This is their campaign:

"There's magic in the air ... Open a Citibank Rupee Checking Account ... and maintain a No Minimum Balance Account for the next 20 years".

I better hope it's a no minimum balance account if they've got their worker-bees syphoning my money out of it faster that I can put it in.

Dobbs racist? Please stop irrational accusations

[Augusto]

Whatever you tink about Lou Dobbs, it's very irresponsible to just dismiss him as a racist.

Even "nationalist" is nonsense, he's merely pointing out one of the problems with unresitriced and unbalanced "unfair" trade. Now, you could argue this is a good thing, and we could point out the problems and have a discussion. But by labeling him a racist, the only thing you're trying to do is to "shut down" any arguments by coming up with ridiculous ad hominem attacks.

I'm an immigrant to this country, and I'm not a fan of outsourcing. I'm all for other immigrants from all over the world to continue coming here and contributing their talents to our local economies, but there is a problem when now people don't even want to become US residents, because they jobs are being drained away from here. We're about to face a serious crisis, when our technological workforce is being decimated by these companies. And there's nothing racist in pointing that out, nothing.

As for security, I don't think most if any people here are saying that a particular nationality is less trustworthy. But you'd be a fool if you don't recognize that some of the safety mechanism we enjoy in this country, are not as robust or even exist in other parts of the less developed world. As we deal with the poorest of nations, with our sensitive data, we have to be *extremely* careful. Already, there have been incidents of bribing by local crime syndicates in some of these countries to obtain data to steal identities. Can that happen in the US? Of course! But the question is, where is it more likely, and what are the protections we need to employ in these situations.

There's a rich discussion to be had on this topic, but please, try to come up with something better than "they're racist".

Slashdot must pay pretty well.

[argStyopa]

... to transfer ~$350,000 (Rs. 1.5 crores) in their names, a large sum in Indian currency.

I don't know about all you dot.com gajillionaires, but $350,000 is a large sum in my world, too.

If $350,000 ISN'T a significant sum of money, please email me, I'd like to borrow some pocket change.

Re:No one listened to us, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot makes me sad sometimes.

Another way to test Bank's security

[dygital]

I know its not the 'best' thing to do, but its good to test their security of your account. No matter what call center it is; account security is critical.

I tried to social engineer some acct info around to get account numbers and such and just general account info. My bank, luckily, just hung up since its apparent they are aware of the issue. As a result, I make deposits there. I've yet to try doing an ANI Fail, and have Telus make a call on behalf of a bank, however I expect to have no success

I believe with outsourcing, comes tracking programs for all account activity (for call centers), which logs all activity so it can be traced easily; where as before it was maybe less of an issue, so it wasn't a high priority.

On a side note; T-Mobile call center reps are not trained against social engineering, despite the Paris Hilton press coverage.

I you people only knew...

[Genjurosan]

All the outsourcing arguments aside:

With my work experience I can say that I it's so scary, that it makes me want to switch to cash and money orders for everything.

NOTE: I have access to 1 million new SSNs a month.

Consider some of my offshore counter-parts that US law inforcement would have a hard time prosecuting. Someone could sell that data for $250k or, then buy themselves protection from US authorities in a state that doesn't extradite.

This, the Choicepoint, and Lexus Nexus scandals are only the beginning. I'm certain that there are incidents that haven't ever, no will ever even be known. There isn't a law, other than in CA, that forces companies to disclose that there was theft.

Trouble with Outsourcing Call Centers

[Whatchamacallit]

This proves that the trouble with outsourcing a call center is with confidential information. Another major problem is pissing off your customers/clients because they can't understand the customer service agents strong accent. I've read several major publications all claiming the above two reasons for not outsourcing their customer service to another country.

There are new laws in the US for privacy. These laws are forcing financial institutions and health insurance companies to better secure their customer/client data. I work in an enterprise environment where we are currently implementing major security changes across all systems just because of the privacy laws. Here's a list of only some of the changes:

1. All users who have access to customer confidential data are completely logged with a full audit log. i.e. you just query a client and only read the data, it's logged. You query a client you shouldn't need to query and a red flag goes up. All transactions are logged and audited. Customer service reps have FULL ACCESS to all client data and transaction history. This need to be protected as much as possible.

2. All users who do not 'need' access to the client data have been removed from access. This includes programmers who once had access to production systems and live customer data. If a production problem occurs, the user has to contact their manager and request a special temporary user ID that is set to expire in 24 hours. This temporary id is issued to the user and reset. When the programmer or engineer is done with the user id, it's returned and reset. If the id is not returned, it's reset automatically within 24 hours or less. These special temp ID's have extra security and logging is more aggressive.

3. All access to client accounts, even access via clients themselves is logged.

4. All call center calls are recorded and archived for long term storage. Clients are told they are on a recorded line three different ways, once the automated voice system tells the user that all calls are recorded, the agent answers the phone and tells the client they are on a recorded line, and three there is a beep now and then to remind the client. Also they are recorded while on hold (just because it's easier then trying to stop recording). I would love to hear what people say when they think they are on hold and no longer being recorded! Call center manager frequently listen in on their service agent calls and review recordings daily.

5. There are departments such as special investigations and some legal departments that end up researching and reviewing logs when necessary. i.e. constantly looking for fraud or assisting the SEC, FBI, or police in an investigation.

Now, you outsource a customer call center to India and you let them access your client data. They need full access just like your local staff did. Trying to secure that data becomes much more difficult then if you are doing it here. Situations like what happened to Citibank are just one possibility. Another one, would be if the Indian Companies network is breached or their servers hijacked? Who really knows, because it's no longer on your network, how do you control the security? Obviously, you can't just host the servers in the US and provide the Indians a secure uplink, the cost is prohibitive and the speed is not great enough. You would have to put the servers in India. Imagine a 1,000 call center reps hitting the servers 24/7 with queries, you can't just pipe that to the US over a leased line!

Outsourcing customer data access to another country opens up major security questions as well as customer relations. I called 411 (information for local telco) and ended up talking to an Indian who couldn't get the name of the restaurant right even though I spelled it for him (Alpha Tango Foxtrot, etc) and kept giving me the wrong number. I gave up and went to the Internet to get the phone number! Try calling Circuit City sometime! I love how they answer the phone with a thick Indian accent but say their name is Chris or Richard! What a hoot, aliases to make them sound American!

Re:Trouble with Outsourcing Call Centers

[dygital]

You raise very good points, and I completely agree with the requirements.

At my job, my customer service management tool is logged for any account I access, change info, and update notes on the account. I dont have access into high-profile accounts like celebrities (ie, 50 Cent, Bill Gates, etc), I cant delete/change history. Only the actual represenatives in each department get the access they need. Every quarter they review everyone's access, and effectively change permissions. Best example; Technical Support doesnt need billing rights or bump rights; therefore they dont have it, I do ;). I've also signed my soul away in about 13 NDA's and if I did use the info I see fraudulently I probably could be arrested for it; they mentioned that alot on training LOL.

I agree, I dislike companies with their entire staff being employed outside of here; however I'm okay with after hours support since they have opposite hours that we do. For places that REQUIRE no accents, (ie, 411) should not consider India as a viable option. I cant imagine if I called 911 and got an india rep.

secret pin codes

[yincrash]

...had the secret pincodes of the customers' e-mail IDs, which were used to transfer money.

my secret pincodes are only kept in my front jacket pocket...

Which Bank?

[LinuxWhore]

Well, I'm personally thankful that they didn't hack US Bank accounts.

Confused? So was I.

Tip of the iceberg

[jabber01]

While this is just a bunch of individuals being unscrupulous in their handling of other people's money, just wait...

Wait until some unscrupulous coder hand your outsources CVS source tree over to a company in a former Soviet State.

Sure, you have "legal contracts" to prevent that. But once your course is out there, no amount of legal action (even if you do manage to find the people responsible, and manage to get them into a sympathetic jurisdiction) will get your IP back under your control.

Some things are not outsourced, ever, no matter the cost advantage. Some things that should not ever have been outsourced, already have been, because the bean-counters had no sense of the pain to which they could be subject as a result.

Give it time. The access methods to the customer data of major financial and insurance agencies, as well as the sources of major retail packages, are quite likely to be floating around as we speak. And even if they don't get disseminated, they're worth a king's ransom, and such ransom will be due in due time.

Bank's Security Policies = Crap

[$peed00]

After working at a regional bank for a number of years, I noticed that all the Security Prodecures that banks rave about are really just a joke. The only time they are even used is to dust them off during their OCC audit. The truth is ANY employee can get sensitive information Luckly most people don't know how to use it.

Doesn't surprise me.

[AtariDatacenter]

I did a credit card app over the phone. I got an employee from India. We went through all the details and were ready to do the balance transfer. I gave him the account number that I wanted to transfer. He told me they couldn't do the balance transfer because it turned out to be from the same bank. Chase.

So, I told him that I didn't want the card. He then went on about the benefits. I told him I didn't want the card. He then went on about the benefits. I asked him if he could do the balance transfer at those rates. He said no. I told him I didn't want the card. He told me about the benefits of the card, I asked him if that included the balance transfer, he said no. He told me about more benefits of the card. (Repeat, repeat, repeat, until he got tired.) Finally, he got the message. I didn't want the card.

Two weeks later, I discover that my original Chase balance was paid off. Another week later, I find this new Chase credit card in my mail. Looks like he pushed my credit application through, anyhow, against my permission. Likely to boost his own stats.

Moral that I walked away with? Foreign BPO employees don't feel as accountable as the real thing. And they believe they can plausably write these things off as 'a misunderstanding' when explaining it to their bosses.

Re:Doesn't surprise me.

[Xeger]

Wait... so this guy nulled out your balance on the original Chase card, then sent you a new one with zero balance? And you're complaining why, exactly?

Perhaps you mean that he transferred the balance to the new Chase card which he gave you, both without your permission (and going against his earlier claim that you couldn't transfer balance from another Chase card). In that case, I can understand why you might be flustered.

Not trying to discredit your story or ruin your point... just curious.

Re:Doesn't surprise me.

[AtariDatacenter]

Perhaps you mean that he transferred the balance to the new Chase card which he gave you, both without your permission (and going against his earlier claim that you couldn't transfer balance from another Chase card). In that case, I can understand why you might be flustered.

Bingo.

Re:Doesn't surprise me.

[radish]

Blame Chase. They've done this (and other unfriendly things) to me in the past, so I left. In my case it was a US call center - they're still jerks.

Re:City of Pune?

[rubycodez]

no, I read the City of Prune, but then us older slashdotters might think more about regularity than 'tang

There's always that "social contract" cliche

[ianscot]

On the other hand, you don't have to be poor to be so consumed by greed that you're willing to steal or commit fraud to further line your pockets.

A big part of me wants to blame the criminal -- Ken Lay, you're a criminal, and we're disgusted when we read about your excesses. But part of me wants to look at the bigger world in which a crime like this gets committed, too.

The further you are away from someone -- socially or physically or in whatever senses -- the more likely you probably are to think of that person as some sort of abstraction rather than a complete human being. If I work in a small town bank, when someone comes in with a check to deposit I see her handwriting and watch her gather up her kids to leave the lobby. Probably I'm not going to steal from her without thinking about that. If I'm on a call center in India, all the financial numbers on my screen are numbers, not people's savings and livelihoods. They're disembodied voices on the phone, if that.

It's not technology, exactly. The networking technology that puts these people in contact with their victims is the same one that lets someone working on a legal team in the Philippines send me a note about a review I wrote three years ago. That cuts both ways.

I almost hate to come down this way, but it seems like a big part of the breakdown here is corporate interests. Companies that send their work overseas in order to be competitive aren't bound by the same sorts of "social contracts" that we expect from local employers. They exist across more than one legal system, they're used to treating people by different standards in different places... it just seems like a recipe for the erosion of any sort of public spirit. And corporate cultures are amazingly powerful things.

I guess it's time for me to start protesting at World Bank meetings or something... which I never thought I'd do. But there's a gap, here, in the way people see each other as people, and it's opening wider at precisely the point where the most economic clout's being applied. That ain't good.

Re:Just a matter of time

[alphakappa]

"Do I stay a poor slave, or take a chance at the HIGH life. My good side (If I have one) is saying: No, don't do it.....it's wrong. But the gravity is much stronger on the other side. I've been poor and unfed all my life......living in a place where being in jail could mean I get fed at least daily....."

Do you even know what you area talking about? Call center workers are not 'poor slaves'... they make more money than the average Indian, and have better working conditions. Heck, please do get out of your well and learn more about the world around you.

Outsourcing + Contract Employment = Crime

[Anonymous Coward]

--Yes, you know something is wrong, and Brazil is where it happened... so you just call up the local UK police, and tell them to go to Brazil and arrest somebody, right?

The problem here is not with the particular nationality of anyone involved, but the concept: many Indian employees are paid well compared to local rates, they also know that they are only paid a fraction of what they know the former US workers were. Additionally, (it is my understanding that) many the Indians are essentially hired on a temp/contract employment basis. If you know that you are getting paid a pittance from a rich foreign company and you can reasonably expect that you will eventually be cut loose anyway, then what would motivate you NOT to steal? Certainly not gratitude towards your employer, or the assumption of a permanent position.

-Additionally, outsourcing companies in India are already getting bit hard by work leaving for places that are even cheaper.

So to speak: the Indian is not dumb, they may see that the gravy train is coming through town, but it ain't stopping for long. And thus the tempation to get what one can while the getting's good.... Most would not commit such crimes of course--but if just 1/10 of one percent do, the costs to the affected companies would be huge. They might even have to cut back on their CEO severance benefits....

(somehow I feel no sympathy for companies that get screwed this way, this was all a very predictable risk that reasonable people would have seen coming)

Do the banks deserve it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad, but the losses that the banks incur will most likely be written off.

Banking is a coddled industry of insiders.
They have been negligent in doing proper security.

And yet they get to rule us all.

More than just job loss

[zioncity]

Looks like outsourcing of jobs is costing us more than just jobs, but all our hard earned cash too.

Sneaky bastards I say, hehe

I like reading stuff like this

[G00F]

Anything that makes outsourcing mid-high end jobs to 3rd world countries a bad idea is good in my book.

I don't mind people coming here to get jobs, but competing with people who can live on 1 dollar a day for what was above average job is impossible to compete with here.

I hope a lot of noise is made about this, and things start coming back here, and things like tech support is no longer a high school job. And the level of the support given would be greater.

What for?

[bluethundr]

Why would these Indian folks need to steal from banks? I mean they already have casinos f'r crissakes! ....ooooohhhh. nevermind. I understand now.

Harder to Prosecute from a Distance

[Tablizer]

It doesn't matter where people are located. What matters is that you have trustworthy people handling your business.

In short, it does matter for at least two reasons:

1. It is more difficult to prosecute across borders. The legal process is slow enough for internal processes, and doubly so for cross-border crimes.

2. The temptation is bigger if comparative value of the crime is magnified by cost-of-living differences. A crime that may pay $10,000 may look more like a $100,000 crime to somebody with India's cost of living.

This is GREAT news

[Lovejoy]

This is fantastic for US workers, especially telecom workers. The telecom workers' union couldn't ask for better PR.

If they were smart, and completely devoid of ethics and morals, they'd start hiring Indian telecom workers to violate USians' privacy.

What's his name?

[BAlkyMAn]

Did anyone notice the mastermind's name was Ivan Samuel Thomas? I don't know any Indian guys named Ivan, Samuel, or Thomas. What's up with that? Are we exporting our criminals too?

An Indian Lumberg is to blame

[scupper]

This is all probably driven by resentment and office politics fomented by an Indian Lumberg. Guess they didn't see Office Space.

Scapegoating Indian workers/outsourcing too easy

[scupper]

It's too easy to scapegoat Indian call center workers and saying "I told you so". There have to be far more instances of this taking place stateside in the past. I'm sure banks went into overdrive to spin the media coverage on them. Now, we'll probably see a littany of op-eds from morons at the NY Times eluding to how Indian workers can't be trusted.

This is a CITIBANK(unnamed bank) problem, not an outsourcing or Indian workforce problem. Citibank is just too big for it's britches and someone in Citibank's NJ HQ probably got a cut of this scam. Bet you'll see it come out in the investigation months from now, and how other banks are investigating stateside workers who are setting up these scams with workers abroad.

hrm..

[Rodney L Caston]

yep.. outsourcing confidenial info to other nations is perfectly safe people... nothing to see here, move along ... your government is in control...

Not sure how big an incident it will take before we stop using these subcontinent subcontractors... Does that make them subsubs?

Re:What's wrong with the heart of Citibank? Read o

[TheGratefulNet]

interesting.

so, are there ANY credit card companies that don't have the same kind of bad history and lack of trust that you say citi has?

my cards are citi - but I'll change if there's a better choice out there.

Re:Lowers the threshold

[maraist]

hose were multi-billion dollar fraud, these are minor amounts of money.

I disagree, as the article said, $350k is a LOT in India. It might as well have been a multi-million-dollar coup (which is equivalent to what the heads of Enron probably earned from the scandel).

The issue, in my mind is that there were bright individuals in India without a creative outlet to financially succeed. There simply isn't the infrastructure and commercial-basis for becoming a multi-millionaire thanks to out-of-the-box thinking. Thus very bright individuals wind up working in crappy little high-paying jobs. There is little opportunity for advancement, and anything that would be challenging isn't likely to pay off. So you have intelligent minds taking your credit card numbers and other personal info.

If, on the other hand, intelligent people flocked to industry creating ventures, then those that man the phones would be the under-achievers. Their motivational structure is different, and thus they are generally only capable of pulling off pety crimes which generally are preventable by corporate governance.

The problem is not with India, or even China. The problem is that the US is tapping into this semi-lawful society, and expecting them to work just like min-wage Americans, when the dynamic is completely different.

You can still outsource to them, but treat them more as if you were outsourcing to a minimum-security prison (which many American firms do).

Re:"What kind of name is Pune?"

[ggvaidya]

Heh. I'm from Pune, sort of. I was just surprised that GP hadn't bothered to look it up. Of course, IHBT :P.

simplest solution

[yoha]

This crime is easily thwarted by black listing the log-in from every country except for the United States (or home country). The user can white list the countries they want to log in from. These crimes are only likely to be more frequent as spy-ware keyloggers, and other methods, generally spread the availability of logins around the world. The black list would probably affect fewer than 1% of customers, and customers that are traveling would always have access to the phone system. Cell phone providers already do this with SIMM cards.

response was quick...

[achacha]

Hey at least in India the perpetrators were promptly arrested which means that teh country is taking this sort of thing seriously. In Nigeria I am convinced the government gets kickbacks from all the scams pouring out of that country. I would rather have a support center in India rather than Africa any day (until African countries start taking this thing seriously that is).

The problem isn't outsourcing...

[Baldrson]

The same thing happened with Enron and Worldcom without nearly so much outsourcing. They did however have a huge HUGE H-1b staff.

Citibank? Good! They're e-mailing me CONSTANTLY!

[The_REAL_DZA]

And the worst part of it is, when I click on the link they send me, they always ask for the SAME DARNED INFORMATION!! You'd think they could store that stuff in a database somewhere...

In other news, my credit rating is -infinity and I'm overdrawn by one billion dollars on my checking account. I didn't know I even had that many CHECKS!!

Dear Honourable Sir,

[the-build-chicken]

I am writing to ask for your assistence in a matter of great urgency. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I find myself incarcerated by my opressive government for liberating a corrupt system of $350, 000. This money is being held in hidden bank accounts the details of which only I know about. Due to my unfortunate situation, I find myself unable to transfer the money out of the country and am humbly writing to request your assistence in this most urgent of matter. Should you decided to help me with this I will gladly share half the money with you. This matter is most urgent and requires your immediate reply.

Sincerely .......

Let's do the math!

[DavidTC]

Why is everyone forgetting the Olympic Park bomber? Who also bombed a gay nightclub and an abortion clinic.

Anyway, he did three separate attacks. The Olympic Park was to kill police officers, and the other two were to fight 'immorality' by killing peope.

Timothy McVeigh has one total, to kill government employees.

Both the Unabomber and the DC Sniper are harder to count, as they committed a string of smaller instances. Let's just call each reached the terrorism level of two larger attacks.

The Unabomber was attacking people basically randomly, out of a weird luddite political position.

The DC Sniper...I don't think anyone's figured that out.

And, of course, the World Trade Center was attacked twice, by the same people. Let's call that three, one half for the unsuccessful attack and two and half for 9/11.

Totals for race:
Black:2
White:6 (2 of those by Jews, if that matters.)
Arabic:3

Totals for 'religion', or at least apparent religion:
Muslim:6 (DC Sniper was Muslim, wasn't he?)
Jewish:2 (Kaczynski was Jewish, wasn't he?)
Christian:4

Totals for cause
Unknown: 2
Religious: 5 (2 Christian, 3 Muslim)
Political: 4 (2 right wing, 2 eco-terrorist.)

Gender
Just kidding, they're all male.

Adding all those up, it appears the most dangerous people are white Muslim males. Except there weren't any of those in the list, so let's go to the next runner up:

White Christian males. Who either have strong opinions about about how people shouldn't be immoral, or strong opinions about how the government is to far too the right or the left. And I'd have to say people who think that both are true, like the Olympic park bomber, probably belong at the top of the list.

The least dangerous people are apparently...black Jewish women. Hrm.

Anti-immigrant?

[Augusto]

Again, lost of people here just resort to unfounded attacks.

How is he anti-immigrant? Please explain.

See? Outsourcing does pay!

[CitznFish]

Yeah, it could happen in the U.S. too, but at least we can keep a closer watch on them.

Did Citi switch you from Visa to MC?

[Linuxathome]

I agree. With so much media attention on the bigwigs of Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Anderson, you wonder why there was so little attention on Citibank. I thought that I was the only one who started getting suspicious when Citi bank changed my Visa to a Mastercard without prior notice. The only reason I could think of was that they were trying to make more money to cover their losses. They must be making more money by switching their users from Visa to MC -- there's no other reason. If Visa is "where I want to be," then why did they switch me without my approval? I thought that it only happened to a select few, until I started talking to colleagues with the same issue. I am asking the slashdot crowd, did this happen to you? Is anyone out there still holding a Citi card that is Visa instead of MC? Don't you think there ought to be some explanation from Citi as to why they did this?

Re:The real Horror in all of this. - When will it

[DavidTC]

It's not that bad. Most crimes are in the service industry. It's hard to see how we could outsource car theft or drug dealing.

Re:Citibank Outsourcing - Exclusivity ?

[ErikZ]

I'll do it.

I can't remember the last time I saw an ad for a bank going "Looking for programmers, will train!"

It's usually along the lines of "Must have experience programming on a mainframe. And know exotic technologies that went out of date 20 years ago."

As far as I'm concerned, programming is programming, if I want to do something new and exciting I'll join the Marines.

But if there's anyone in Denver looking for a new guy to take the place of their dead guy, send me a note. erik.zolan@gmail.com

Re:Dobbs racist? Please stop irrational accusation

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a hike pal. American Capitalism did exactly the same things to 3rd world Latin American countries if not worse than what Lou Dobbs describes as happening to "Americans" (Read aging white urban professional crowd). His incessent rant about illegal aliens is pathetic. Illegal aliens (mostly mexicans) are everywhere. They do all menial work. Instead of crediting them for doing these jobs, he is trying to make them untouchables. He never presents the other side of the coin and he is a journalist. I dont see why the person who called him a racist should!

If you are willing to lick shoes to immigrate to America and others are not, thats your problem. (You wearing an american flag for a tshirt doesnt change the fact that you jumped through hoops to achieve immigrant status and everyone knows it.) Whether you like it or not, outsourcing will stay, because thats the way capitalism works. If you dont like it, go back to where you came from - you might find a job. Your opinion doesnt matter unless you are ultra rich.

Finally: Welcome to America. Land of Opportunity. And Lou Dobbs is a pretty pathetic attempt at covering up racism.

Re:How To Improve Security Of Outsourced Call Cent

[$criptah]

No, I am not. And whoever modded this shit down better put an extra lock on the house door (caz I am going to pay a visit).

On a more serious note. I work hard for my money. If a bank decides to save some loot and offshore the operations, the bank must be resposible for the actions. I realize that all the money is insured by FDIC (up to $100K); however, this is not the matter of government insurance. This is a matter of whoring American jobs out somewhere else in order to pay less money. Why stop at that? Why not make sure that we get a good bang out of the smaller sum of money. If it were up to me, I'd put every "John" who steals money on a death row.

Re:What's wrong with the heart of Citibank? Read o

[ArtStone]

Like Robert Rubin?

http://www.citigroup.com/citigroup/corporate/bus in essheads/rubin.htm
http://www.ustreas.gov/educati on/history/secretari es/rerubin.html
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome .shtml

Talking about racisim, the irony

[Augusto]

> If you are willing to lick shoes to immigrate to America and others are not, thats your problem. (You wearing an american flag for a tshirt doesnt change the fact that you jumped through hoops to achieve immigrant status and everyone knows it.)

I'm a US citizen because I became naturalized. There's no such concept as only being a US citizen because you are born here, unless you favor some weird nativist notion that doesn't make sense considering mostly everybody in this country came from immigrants.

It's weird how you call Dobbs racist, yet you feel people are not really US citizens here because they weren't born here.

Hypocrite.

Re:This Is Only Get Worse

[Cheirdal]

He's more likely to steal the information because he's not governed by U.S. laws. I would have that was clearly spelled out in my original message. I wrote it using plain English and I was very clear about why someone would be more likely to commit a crime outside U.S. jurisdiction.