Slashdot Mirror
Offshored Identity Theft
Travoltus writes "The threat of increased misuse of consumer personal data by offshore criminals was first made publicly known with the UCSF Pakistani medical transcriber scandal. Then, in a logical progression of events, it was discovered that foreign criminal interests were offering money to offshored call center workers to surrender consumer data. Now that threat has been realized: Offshored call center staffers at Mphasis BPO have allegedly stolen £200,000 using United States customers' personal information. It is believed that Indian police reacted swiftly to catch the thieves, but only £12,000 has been recovered so far, and it is not really known who orchestrated this theft or where the rest of that money is now. It is also unknown as of yet how much of a mess this has created for the U.S. citizens who were victimized. Let's hope that the people whose information was stolen don't have to go through what other identity theft victims have to endure, to clean up their good name."
I guess this says a harder look will be given to outsourcing before actually sending work overseas.
Why is identity theft by foreigners considered more scary that identity theft by Americans. I'd bet you $100 that the vast, vast, vast majority of credit card fraud on Americans is committed by their fellow countrymen[0].
[0] Or women.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
We cant trust foreigners... They have militaries.
Luckily we have one also.
Please fill in you credit card number, social security number, date of birth, mother's maiden name and your password to all you most important information below:
Liked the comment so much, you posted it twice.
The worst part about stuff like this is that the system is set up in favor of the person stealing the information. There are what seems to be very few safeguards to prevent the theft of someone's information. However, when it's time to clean up the mess, those responsible for it, including companies that were mishandling the information, are nowhere to be found. Thus leaving the victim to spend excessive amounts of time and money clearing their "good" name. Just proves the only person watching out for you is yourself, so be careful who you trust.
Surely we can be allowed to have ours
This is one of the biggest problems that I see with our apparently inevitable slide toward an ownership society.
The plan as I read it is to offshore everything with the thought that we'll still own the capital and intellectual property that people who do the actual work will be dependent on. I think incidents like this shine a spotlight on why this kind of thing won't work in the long term. What happens when the people who do the actual work (and that you're throwing the equivalent of scraps to) decide they don't like your arrangement? They change the rules (example: steal people's identities) and you have little recourse since you don't actually do anything and are wholly dependent on them.
I'm a big tall mofo.
The parent is the first dupe post I've seen on Slashdot. Will it get another +5 Insightful? Only time will tell.
:)
Best of luck, Dancin_Santa.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Putting the focus on the fact that the thieves were working in outsourced operations is beside the point. The necessary assumption for this story to make sense, is that these off-shore workers steal more money from Americans than other Americans do. While I don't have statistics in front of me, I highly doubt that the off-shore theft problem is even comparable to in-house work. Big deal, some people stole a relatively small sum of money... it's only news because those "evil Indians" are taking all our jobs and are now stealing our money too!
"They took er jerrrrbs!"
Though, this time it's not as simple as preventing the future from happening.
Wow - someone redundant'd themselves. Amazing that he still got a second +5 Insightful.
I wonder if he wrote the original or he just picked it up from another web site?
This topic was discussed extensively (of course, with flames). Should be a slow day.
The real reason for not wanting my personal information to leave this country is that I have more faith in the laws of my country to be able adequately deter & punish the folks who commit these sorts of crimes. I don't think that non-US citizens are any more or less good people, but they may have less of a deterrent to do the right thing.
The matter is simple. Sure, there is millions of usd changing hands in ID theft cases in the US daily, perpetrated by US citizens. Why is that less of an issue? Because there exist no legal barriers o jump to prosecute native citizens. To go after, arrest, and convict the perpetrators in Pakistan or India requires a joint effort of multiple governments, something that takes vastly more time and effort than just having a local justice write you up a warrant and being done with it.
it probably isn't the first, I recall seeing similar thing before couple of times. Usually though at least people have the courtesy to not copypaste directly.
anyways.. this is proof of that you could do a slashdot karma-collecting machine quite easily, you would look for similar words in the story text and then automatically repost comments from previous stories that seem like they could be a fit. the discussion is usually general enough and the mods on enough crack to not notice if there's some small thing that goes wrong.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"stolen £200,000 using United States customers' personal information"
£200,000?! I smell a rat. What kind of Americans keep that much British money around?
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".
I concur. There are bad people everywhere. However, if the countries which host these offshore efforts do not respond to the criminal activities at least as well as the US (which shouldn't be too hard in my mind) then they will lose the ability to either gain or maintain business. Also, consumer choice may have an effect over the long term (similar to the "look for the union label" or the boycott of manufacturers that use child labor/sweat shops). I have no doubt the absence of offshore labor could become a marketing tool in the near future.
"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."
Closer, in the instant case, meaning the same continent or at least someplace where we can capture and prosecute the fsckers.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
You forgot to offer chocolate for it...
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
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.
While offshoring of these type of jobs may be inevitable, I would expect companies to be damn sure of what they are doing if they are handing my personal details to a third party, especially one outside the US
While dealing with identity theft happening within the US is bad enough, it would be a nighmare trying to sort this out when it happens overseas. ... i.e you are essentially at their mercy.
This does not mean that people outside the US are any more (or less) dishonest than within. But when you try to track down criminals in another country you are essentially at the mercy of the police in that place, and there may be no way of compelling them to help
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
That's all that matters to upper management -- savings. Now, with many offshoring efforts only yielding 10 or 15% savings, what does an event like this do? It blows any potential savings, resulting in a net loss. Nice going, Mr. Shiny Hair And Teeth Strategic-Thinker!
Now, this question is directed at those big-shot CIOs who troll here, let me ask you something (feel free to reply as ACs). How much money does something like *this* cost your precious bottom line? And when it happens again, then what? What could possibly happen that would make you think "Gee, maybe our technical staff shouldn't live on the other side of the world and work for somebody else (including our competition)?" Or does that even matter?
Yeah, yeah, I know... Fugeddaboutit, it's purely rhetorical. I realize that employment horizon of the corporate ruling class is only as far ahead as their golden parachute payout. I'm sure you'll find a way to blame these failures on somebody else, Mr. Executive, and your replacement can implement a new strategy for cleaning up the mess.
Don't trust foreigners?
.. and you've convicted all foreign workers as thieves and miscreants.
What about all the call center workers who DIDN'T steal identities? What's this irrational fear of everyone and everything foreign? Yes there are bad individuals out there? You want to categorize an entire people based on actions of a few?
Not everyone is evil, there is the police that apparently managed to catch this guys. What about them? No credit for what they did?
What about identity theft carried out in america by americans?
So far there are two cases of identity theft via outsourcing
Sure location matters. If your employees are nearby, you can keep tabs on them. You might even be able to directly affect their morale in a positive manner.
Either way, you can keep better control of things.
Also, culture is relevant in these matters. Some countries have traditions of institutionalized graft. To casually gloss over such differences is the real racist notion here.
What you are promoting is pretty much equivalent to the notion that if you speak slow enough everyone will understand english.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"The threat of increased misuse of consumer personal data by offshore criminals was first made publicly known with the UCSF Pakistani medical transcriber scandal"
As a Pakistani, I am somewhat offended by the incorrect assumption made here. The medical transcriber was not paid for her work. She then "threatened" to release the medical data of various patients. Desperate mesure for sure, but she really didn't have much recourse. She couldn't take them to small claims court in Pakistan or something like that. Does this make her a "criminal" as suggested by the story? I hardly think so.
I don't see the problem. If your identity gets stolen and your credit rating gets shot-to-hell, just steal the identity of someone else.
Anonymous Cowards have no fear of identity theft.
I think the issue underscored here is risk vs. reward. For someone in the US 30,000 USD isn't *that* much, not enough for many of us to risk jail time. That amount barely covers a years salary for many and I'd say for most reading this site it is way less then a years salary. If you're making $2.00/hr that is a LOT of money. Now we are talking almost a DECADE of salary.
Maybe it's not the same story but both stories originate from Pune, India and both deal with employees of a call center transferring money in the amount of Rs 1.5 crore.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
May be offtopic3 05-cp.html
The United States is willing to review a British Columbia report that concludes the U.S. Patriot Act has the power to eyeball private information about Canadians,
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2004/10/29/692
It's funny how the nazi anti outsourcing and anti free trade crowd used to rant about a foreign worker's plight and conditions (and therefore we supposedly shouldn't have free trade for their sake), but now when then argument has failed due to the obvious lies it carried .. they have switched to saying foreigners are evil, don't deserve work even if they can do it cheaper, and should starve and die .. cause hey one or two of them might even be terrorists.
I, for one, welcome our new identity thieving overlords.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
and are betting that the dollar will continue to slide. Pounds and Euros have been a goo investment over the past couple of years.
Best Slashdot Co
There is a remedy for handling this in the future for US citizens. We need to push our legislators to enforce it, which is obviously hard to do.
US Corporations are legally (criminally and civily) liable for the accuracy and protection of data that they collect on US Citizens.
This then needs to be negotiated into international treaties.
This would make a given company think twice about what information it really needs to be collecting, and how it will be protected. If the company wishes to outsource work, fine, that needs to be disclosed, and the company still remains liable for the protection of that data.
There need to be laws, and the laws must have teeth. This is a "service" that companies are carrying out "in the public trush." They need to be penalized for violations.
because I can't
wot no sig
from www.telediscount.co.uk - calls to India are 15p/minute.
... for that, you could pay your worker in the UK.
Assuming that they get a good deal, and only pay half that, 7p/min...
Now, 7p * 60 min = £4.20/hr
This doesn't even take into account the time you're kept on hold (which, in my experience, is often several times the length of the actual call), the costs of networking all your customer data there and back, or the increased call length due to poor phone line quality (as provided by Rice Krispies Telecom)
The Washington DC area metro system recently went to electronic cards for paying for using their parking garages. The all of a suddent realized that low paid workers that have large ammounts of money passing through their hands on a daily basis are a bad risk in terms of theft of said money.
Comment maid by other people: "No shit, Sherlock." and "Duh!"
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
....why i am wanted in Karachi, Brisbane and Lagos.
FYI, Lou Dobbs was called a racist by Al Franken for using the term, better close your eyes, "illegal alien".
Another group of people are mad at him for writting "People who come to the US with H-1B and L1 visas don't pay any taxes, and they return home with all the money they earned here. They are all cheap foreign labor."
If you think thoses are racist terms then don't click on the link to slashdot.
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.
Ok It looks like the stories a dupe but the comment too!...
i d-1070986,curpg-1.cms
or is it just coincidence that
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050411/152/fg2a3.html
"Police said the employees allegedly stole customers' personal account information and transferred just under £200,000 to fake accounts in Pune. Sanjay Jadhav, the assistant commissioner of police, said about one million rupees (£12,000) of the fraud money has already been recovered. The call centre workers left their jobs last December."
and http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/ms
"PUNE: Cyber crime has moved to the next level in Pune. Close on the heels of the Webcam Kulkarni scandal, in which a tenant secretly filmed girl students staying in his hostel using hidden cameras, the Pune police have unearthed a major siphoning racket involving former and serving callcentre employees.
They allegedly transferred a total of Rs 1.5 crore (US $3.5 lakh) from a multinational bank into their own accounts, opened under fictitious names. The money was used to splurge on luxuries like cars and mobile phones.
Twelve people, including the alleged mastermind, have been arrested. The police are trying to determine the extent of the scam and whether the accused committed such crimes earlier.
Addressing a press conference on Wednesday, police commissioner D.N. Jadhav said, "This is a rare case in which criminals have exploited the weaknesses in high-end technology." "
or has D.N jadhav been exceptionally busy.
Its not been said in this version of the story but in the "original" citybank was mentioned.
See -- even criminals benefit from offshoring!
And MphasiS is the parent company of MsourcE (company from the previous article).
MphasiS buys out MsourcE
I wonder how long before class action lawsuits arise out of this. It seems reasonable to assume that outsourcing and offshoring of this sensitive personal information would be a risky practice and could even border on negligence.
liability. Oh wait, that would mean trial lawyers extracting outrageous settlements from sincere and honest corporations. Call Congress!
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
I for one know that if I ended up in such a situation, without the knowledge that my private information was being handled by a 3rd party and that I suffered losses as a result I would sue the ass of that company!
Maybe until this sort of thing starts to happen we won't see much change in this area.
Stuff that cannot be easily stolen via some simple data transfer or bit level copy over a network.
For example, own gold, silver, Real Estate, Automobiles, etc. Pay for these things... do not use credit cards, only use cash. Place the titles/proof of ownership in a safety deposit box at the bank and give your lawyer and next of kin copies as well. Now, let's see some foreign guy steal your ID... who cares?
It's not about trustworthy people. You will find those anywhere. It's about the people who now have access to our personal data being outside of our Legal and Law enforcement system. In the UK they have a data protection act which restricts personal data from going outside their country. The U.S. would be wise to adopt such a policy. One would think it would be a no brainer these days with our talk of being tough on terrorists. In light of recent news of our borders being porous and our domestic response teams being ill prepared. It really makes me wonder if we are really still that concerned about domestic terrorism.
Sources say that somewhere between a quarter and third of illegal credit is done by spouses or parents of underage children(*).
(*) DOB not verified in many credit card applications, so its easy to get cards in children's name.
I don't usually wear a tin foil hat but this is just too ripe to ignore. All that is mentioned is that the person who started this is unknown. I would not put it beyond some American or American orginization who is looking for a way out of all of this outsourcing. If it was an American orginization they could also put the blame on some one else cou-Terrorists-gh and benefit that way as well. But for now I'll take the tinfoil hat off and wait to see who the major news corportations blame for stealing the money.
On behalf of American Identity Thieves Workers Union I would like to strongly protest against this clear
loss of jobs of American people!
Indian identity thieves steal our, American thieves jobs and endanger our true American way of life!
I honestly believe that our government should do something about it!
We need more control over our own credit reports, since advancing our lives is completely dependent on them.
When you support off shoring you support terrorists. Insert sarcastic tone where you feel it is necessary.
this is the most important sig ever! In your face 446154!
IIRC, it's very very hard for foreign companies to get Chinese companies prosecuted. India may be very law-abiding; be aware that that isn't a universal trait.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Does anyone else reading this thread has an impression of d*j* vu????
It's not so much about nationalist or racist concerns. This is about security. Yes, there are untrustworthy people everywhere, but there are more security concerns when companies outsource data overseas. Companies may lose control of their data and become powerless to stop it. Some countries may not have identity theft laws or worse be in collusion with criminals. Those who do may not have the resources to fight it. In the US, identity theft has only recently become recognized as a crime and law enforcement resources alerted to it. While the sky is not falling, it is one thing to consider when outsourcing data overseas.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
All I'm going to say is that last time this was brought up I said that it doesn't matter if they are foreigners or not, they could be prisoners.
The idea is that given the inequity between the two peoples some are going to take from the people with more. Plus you add in that we are in fact the foreigners to them...
How many people have screamed or yelled at a Indian phone worker simply because they couldn't understand the person on the other end? That has to get around, eventually you feel like those people have it coming to them. Just makes it easier considering you are stealing 50 years salary!
Get your Unix fortune now!
All I'm going to say is that last time this was brought up I said that it doesn't matter if they are foreigners or not, they could be prisoners.
What I mean by that is; we've employed prisoners in the past to do these same jobs. What bothers me is that I'd take the job and so would my fellow countrymen. Why do criminials and foreign workers always get this job?
Get your Unix fortune now!
You forget one detail - the poorer the country, the bigger the value that USD 100 has. Most americans would not risk their freedom for 10,000 USD, but for somebody in a poor country that is enough to retire on... so people are more tempted.
It is an inevitable consequence of exporting jobs to lower-paid workers - the temptation to steal is much greater.
Have fun posting.
The wording of this story suggests that the poster intends to malign Indians, rather than encourage healthy discussion on social issues. Why does slashdot encourage these racists?
The best way to deter Indian criminals is to put them in Federal pound me in the ass prison! Of course there might be some international treaties involved. But one passing mention during employee training sessions about one of those Tejas prisons will turn most geek/call center humanoid blood cold everytime they think of stealing!!
--> Your Wisecrack Here
Do you always enjoy copying and pasting your own comments from previous articles? Post from 4 days ago
What happens when the people that actually do the work tear up the piece of paper?
.. there is no immediate end to cheap labor. What I mean is, there are BILLIONS of poor people who will do work.
.. (the earth itself is 30% iron or something if thats relevant and we have unlimited energy from fusion .. or geothermal (how much heat is in the 6000 mile diameter earth core), or other alternatives)). The harnessed energy can be used in automated farming. This is assuming we don't become space faring.
Well, first of all
Once every human is rich, fat, and lazy and doesn't want to work, yes, then maybe we'll have a problem. But hopefully by then we'll have robots, highly automated farming and mining, or something doing the work.
Maybe in the distant future someday the concept of working for money to survive will be considered ancient to humans.
Personally I don't see everyone in the world becoming rich as a problem or threat.
And yes, the world contains more than enough resources to feed everyone and for everyone to have a good lifestyle.
And for those worried about population (though in my view having more humans isnt bad), richer people don't really have population growth.
As for resources and energy
Is that someone who comes in and tries to clean up all the dirty words around here?
Imagine US call center workers... Let's say they make ~$35K/year.
How much do they need to be offered before they'll break the law? 2x salary? 3x? more? Remember, the workers are withing US jurisdiction and will probably be identified. It needs to be enough money to "get away." Let's say 3x salary.
$105K (3x salary) is almost 30 percent of what the thieves stole.
Now, export that job to someone getting paid $8K/year and it not only makes it cheaper for the company outsourcing the work, it also makes it cheaper for the thieves. 3x salary would only be 6% of the take.
And, it may not even require that much money. Being overseas places the call center staff well out of US jurisdiction. Unless the offense is something particularly vile, nations (US included) will generally protect their own.
While I agree that there are bad people everywhere I believe that sensitive data should not be sent out of this country. SSN is an example of something that is used for to many things. I think having tax returns processed oversea's is a really bad idea. Relying on other countries police forces to secure our private data is stupid! I think in time we will all find that all this outsourcing is going to change our way of life for the worse.
You said that before. Shut up and sit down already.
So with that in mind, when is some credit card company and bank going to advertise that they guarantee all your data will remain within the U.S. and not be outsourced?
Someone does that, I'll switch to them. I don't care if their rates are not as competitive. I'll pay extra for the peace of mind.
...s/he got the spammer grammar right:-)
" Please fill in you credit card number..."
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
All your personal information are belong to us. [It was real tempting to post as "Anonymous Coward."]
Lou is the only person in news or politics today with enough guts to call out U.S. politicians and corporations for giving away our economy to foreign interests. Call him what you want, but he is right about this issue.
The idiots running this country today are making a huge cash grab at the expense of the middle class. They have their golden parachutes. Thay don't care about the long-term damage that they are doing to the middle-class.
Well going by the summary, in this case the authorities did act swiftly, so it looks like India is a Good country and the story's emphasis on the location is mostly due to xenophobia.
BTW, here in Canada, we're very weary of companies who outsource some of their information processing to USA. US has very little privacy laws and worse, it has the PATRIOT ACT, so we'd rather spend more money and keep our info away from USA where it can be easily and legally bought by large corporations or copied by the government.
Somtimes you got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. Damn liberals!
That's so Polyanna it almost makes me picture you with pig tails. ;) In the countries you listed 30 or 40 grand is a lot of money. Enough to buy influence with regional authorities who might decide to drag their feet for a piece of the action. Pretty soon the local governments are sidelining their income with identity theft.
This is only the beginning of problems and these people were a bunch of low-level amateurs. Once foreign governments figure out how to monetize that information then you're really going to see some serious shit.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
People who come to the US with H-1B [slashdot.org] and L1 visas don't pay any taxes
Not only is this stupid and racist, it is most of all untrue. Maybe I should claim back all that f***ing money I send to US gov and California State.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Not really. You give most people the opportunity to acquire ill-gotten gains without risk and give them a reason to rationalize it, they will commit the crime 8 times out of 10.
You get what you pay for.
Do you honestly think that somebody could actually go unpunished doing what the Pakistani woman did with confidential medical records in the US? Offshoring has turned into a race to the bottom. I think that companies that put their customers' information at risk by sending it to places with lax privacy laws should be subject to a tax of 50% of their total earnings. The funds of this tax will be used to help ID theft vitctims get their lives back together.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
The problem with your statement is that the U.S. does a crap job of responding to criminal identity theft.
What I say does not represent the views of my employers, my friends, my cats, or myself.
what's more, until I got a green card, I had no hope of ever seeing any of that money back should I need it.
WTF is this goober talking about? The only way you get to send money home without paying taxes is if you're paid under the table. And that's usually crap jobs doing crap for crappy people.
If you have an H1-B (or any other kind of visa) you can't slip under the radar and expect to get away with it.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
> I'm one of the biggest foreigners around
Have you tried Jenny Craig?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Well, there are some foreign countries that have decent protection laws against stuff like this (like, I'm guessing, the UK). Companies shouldn't be penalized for using data services there. Rather, I think that penalities should only apply when a company sends its customers' data to countries with lax personal data protection. The penality I propose is a 50% tax on their earnings, used to help victims of ID theft.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
WTF do you mean by "East Indian"? The country's name is India, for chrissakes, not East India. There is no country or specific entity on earth known as "East India".
The correct response, in keeping with the dupe, is thus:-
May I suggest you lay off the Big Macs and Whoppers for a while then?
In the UK they have a data protection act which restricts personal data from going outside their country
wrong
and there isn't a damm thing you can do about it (unless you are ultra rich and close enough of your accounts so they actually care)
Easy one first:
>>bad people are there in the US too,
Yes, and since they're in the US, in the employment of US companies, they may be easily and switftly prosecuted and stolen money may more easily be recovered. This is not the case in a country strattling the first-world/third-world fence. Hiring a lawyer to represent a foreign company on the other side of the world isn't easy, cheap or effective.
Now, the other point.
>>saving are much more that 10-15%, more around 60-70% atleast.
70%? No way, no how. Don't believe everything the marketing weasels tell you -- they're salesmen who get paid for getting your CIO to sign a contract, delivering results is somebody else's job and by that time the salesmen are long gone.
According to the big consulting firms, a very-well-executed offshore program *may* return 40% savings. In the case of a particular Fortune 100 with which I'm familiar a forecast (and we know how accurate those figures are) savings of 30% *may* only *potentially* be realized after the "startup" phase (i.e. first couple of years) during which there are no savings whatsoever because permanent staff must be pulled off assignments to train the replacement workers, startup/training costs are factored, software licensing costs are added (~4000 per seat at my shop) during the 1st year the offshore staff isn't handling all the support tasks (permanent staff is kept as "3rd/4th line backup", offshore "scouts" are flown to US to gather information, meetings to assess the effort are conducted, reviews of metrics, etc. etc.
In other words, some companies are spending A LOT more up front to offshore, with the hopes that somewhere down the line, years from now, when the permanent staff is fired, the company might save a few bucks. That's if everything goes perfectly, which it won't.
So far, many companies are just spending more and crossing their fingers, hoping the consulting companies deliver on promises.
How can they get by with this? Startup costs for offshoring efforts are put into a different slot by the accountants than operational costs which tends to mask the real spendings and underline the "savings." So it looks like a win-win situation which in fact it's a washout over a three or five year span.
You don't need any kit to recover from identity theft: you need only paper, pen, envelopes, lots of stamps and the addresses of the major credit bureaus.
and if you are rich now (What the fuck are you doing wasting your time on /. when you could be doing some thing useful like [bond]coupon clipping?) you are going to do okay (maybe) but if you owe any money, on a mortgage or on a car or a credit card or... you are so fucked.
99% of us aren't independantly wealthy. Hell we aren't making over $200K/year (okay, some of us are for now but it doesn't last worth a damn. One year, rich, the next year, unfunded) and all that does is give you access to more credit than you could ever repay.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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.
Well, I think it matters. Different foreign countries have varying degrees of lawlessness and corruption. And Pakistan is one of the leading exporters of international terrorism. So, your stolen money may very well be funding terrorist groups.
Hey, bad people are in India. And in the U.S. And in Europe. And in Asia. Oh my god! They are everywhere!
Ye olde 'moral-equivalence' bullshit. You need to look at the degree of mass corruption of a society. Despite the histrionics of the far left, the rule of law still applies in the US and Europe. Not really so, the other places you mention.
you buy an airplane ticket on US Airways. They just outsourced their call-center operations.
What a bunch of misinformed crap from someone who apparently is still bitching about political correctness (but only when it's a liberal that is offended).
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I don't think it's doubting the honesty of foreigners, just expressing concern over the difficulty of catching/prosecuting international criminals.
The true criminals where the Gringos that outsourced the transcribing job to a Pakistani, knowing that she would have no legal means to demand the just payment for her work. From her point of view, the medical records had been abandoned by their former owners, I suppose, so the laws about abandoned property should apply. I don't know what are such laws in Pakistan, but "finders keepers" is the norm in most places.
It is impossible to get cheap good stuff. Period. Everything of quality costs money in this world. Take a look at everything from cars to clothing: once quality starts to rise, so does the price. "Cheap" Hondas are no longer cheap (but reliable). I pay a bit more for good service from Speakeasy because I enjoy fast ticket resolution (if problems exists) and talking to Bobs, Marrys and Johns from the United States.
If customers are willing to accpet cheaper goods, they should be willing to accept lower quality. Period. People do not shop at Wal-Mart becuase they have excellent customer service or high quality goods. People shop there because of low prices. Quality vs. price.... The choice is yours.
Jee. I hope we don't start outsorucing the military. Then we are in big trouble.
Ever read the EULA 'shirk'-wrapped piece of butt-wipe that you have to go through in order to use it?
Did you just click through in order to get to the software?
Are you sure it was just some provisions on the software. How about not holding the bank responsable for identity theft related problems...? For all you know, you've already bent over and told 'em to start fuckin...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Say my visa company is broken into and my personal info (ssn, mothers madien name, etc.) is copied by the perps in say India. Now, a year or so later, some dork in Easter Europe is using my personal information to get credit cards, home loans, whatever. How do I know that the personal information compromised through my visa company was used to assume my identity? It could have just as easily been someone who patiently taped together my shreaded documents or some other company with my personal information that was compromised.
Because so many people have my, and other peoples personal information, the burden of proof for many of these cases is pretty high. In many (most?) cases, it's prohibitively high.
-- john
Pretending that every culture has the same general view of privacy rights is high ignorance.
Pakistan is a country in which "honor killings" are socially acceptable.
It's not a question of "bad people" being everywhere - it's a question of the definition of "good."
In most countries - feeding your family by any available means is a moral trait - The means are irrelevent so long as you stand a better than average chance of remaining free to feed them next week.
That calculation varies from country to country and it has little to do with "bad" and "good".
We live in a country in which the quality of life has benefitted from the slavery and exploitation of people in the rest of the world.
Having killed the Indians for their Land, we enslaved the africans for their muscles, now we corrupt the arab world for their oil, bankrupted eastern europe by sabatoging their oil pipeline, and exploited children in china to make Nike shoes to say nothing of the environment.
At some point the chickens come home to roost.
AIK
That's exactly spot on. To which needs to be added that Identify Theft won't be taken seriously until it impacts our members of Congress.
If someone were to start publishing all the SSN's, Date of Births, Credit Info, Biometric Info, Mental Health records of not just the members of Congress, but also their families, then (and only then) might they possibly rethink that centralized databases are a stupid solution. I say possibly, because the current legal market around database information is quite huge.
I say possibly, because the only tool they have is passing laws. Unfortunately, this is a case where you need the right technology, otherwise the existing information will always be abused.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Because YOU'LL have to pay them back.
ID theft is bad enough (believe me, I know first hand,) in one country with one set of laws and one court system.
Trying to clear up foreign debts may be beyond the ability of anyone. And with the bankruptcy laws being tightened, you may get served with papers from Lower Slobbovia that you knew nothing about and that will have you reaching for a tall glass of 'Kool-Aid.'
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Yeah, but there's a lot less perceived risk if you are in India and are stealing from people in America 10,000 miles away. This fact could lead to the corruption of people that would normally be deterred by the risk of incarceration for their actions.
Hard to imagine that needed saying - all this morality gobblidy gook - of course its about relative risk/reward.
AIK
It is believed that East Indian police reacted
There is only one India and that is in the eastern hemisphere, so there really is no need to say "East Indian".
The point is - if the criminals are in the US, it's much easier to go after them. If they are abroad, good luck. Considering that most thirdworld nation's judicial systems are powered by bribes, prosecuting them is much more difficult.
The key to getting more karma is just to post sooner. The higher the post the more likely a moderator will see it and add a point or two. posts at the end of a thread are less likely to get seen.
I am an H1B worker and I pay taxes and SS and so on! So where did you get this from that H1B workers don't have to pay taxes? I would love to reclaim all the money I paid to the federal government as I don't agree with all the things they spend it for. That's also one of the reasons why I'll probably return home after my 6 years, I would be ashamed to be a citizen of that country! BTW, my home country is neither an asian nor an african country and it isn't Russia or the Ukraine either in case you wonder.
Unfortunately people have so few original ideas, that if one idea was accepted into the discussions only once, and then one had to improve it before using it again, nobody would have anymore anything left to say. But the same thing happens everywhere, not just in Slashdot.
:-)
So let's just keep repeating ourselves, just like I'm doing right now.
I really wouldn't expect this story to affect anyone's bottom line at all.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Oh get the fuck off your high horse. You do know that sheriffs in US are elected? And they need campaign funds? Contributed by people who will have future influence on them?
Read my lips: US is one of the worst Western countries for protecting your information and just as bad as the rest for prosecuting rich criminals.
Wow that's good thinking!! Now, what you gonna do with all that karma? Sell it on Ebay? Put it on your resume? "Qualifications: Slashdot karma: excellent++"? Or do you use it to pick up chicks? "If you show me yours I'll show you my 4-digit karma..."?
Some countries have traditions of institutionalized graft.
Got news for you. ALL countries have traditions of institutionalized graft. Some are just more affordable to the general public. Others will only occur in the famous "smoke filled room"...out of sight out of mind.
What?
What is East Indian? Is there a Red Indian police? West Indian police? Who wrote this? Do people still live in world of "East Indian"? Wake up and learn respect.
where did my sig go? where's my sig at?
Wrong! You're not responsible for fraud that someone else has commited in your name.
"Sure location matters. If your employees are nearby, you can keep tabs on them. You might even be able to directly affect their morale in a positive manner."
Well there goes telecommuting.
The DHS has to get their info somehow. What could be a better way? No silly court orders needed. Everything, including your medical info is out there now. You no longer have any idea why you didn't get that job, or you were turned down for that loan or life insurance, why you can't board the plane. How are you going to find out?... unless you hack their system and chack internal memos? The process has now been hosed. Information could possibly surpass weapons as the world's most profitable contraband. Let's see the dogs sniff that out.
Of course there's no such thing as "IP", and there are those willing to undermine anything having to do with IP.*
*Just imagine a similiar movement with physical goods.
Foreigners may be trustworthy, but if they are out of reach you have no recourse against the UN-trustworthy variety.
Low paid workers have always dealt with a lot of money. The thing is, when they're doing that here in the US, they are accountable. They have to submit their SSN to get paid for the job, they most likely have an address and phone number on file, etc. If you're $1,000 short from register 5 and Joe was working that register, it's not too difficult to track him down if he wants to remain a member of society. It's that fear that keeps people from stealing.
In another country, this accountability may not exist. Police are easily bribed or do not care about the problems of another country. It may be easier to get jobs under an assumed identity, etc.
In any case, I would imagine that the switch to electronic payment was not for security, but for speed, convenience, and the ability to cut the workforce, thus saving money.
And then worry about international identity theft.
I can understand being worried that your personal information ends up being sent outside of your country of citizenship as an effect of outsourcing. It doesn't really matter where it's shipped to, as soon as it crosses the border, it becomes that much harder to catch and prosecute.
The thing is, if people want something badly enough, they will put up with the risk of identity theft. And some people just don't care enough or know enough to take simple precautions. I'll give you an example. I work for a Canadian company that takes orders from both Canada and the United States. We do not take orders through our email, because we do not have any kind of security with regards to our email system. When we contact clients, we specifically say not to email us credit card numbers, expiry dates, or other sensitive information. This isn't in the fine print, either, it's right in the body of the message! Yet people email us that kind of information all the time. And although an American tracing identity theft to Canada is probably a hell of a lot easier than tracing it to India, and our laws are similar in many respects, we are still accross a border. As such it would be significantly more difficult to trace and prosecute an offence committed in Canada from the States.
Identity theft, nationally or internationally, will not stop until people start taking personal responsibility for their information as much as possible. It's like locking your door whenever you leave the house -- a determined theif is not going to be deterred by a lock when there is a window that can be smashed. Locks are just there to keep honest people honest. At least protect yourself against crimes of opportunity.
Indians buy more gold per capita as a form of personal savings than anyone else. Maybe they know something.
Actually this sounds like the perfect way to respond to a dupe.
Could this be an indirect result of all our companies outsourcing their work to other call centers around the world? I tend to think that if our personal information is sent to other parts of the world, we put ourselves at serious risk of having our information stolen. We get transferred to India, and other places that will ask us for credit card numbers, phone numbers, addresses, etc., and they store that information there. Anyone just has to offer enough money to someone in that country, working at that call center or tech support place, and they've got the info they wish to have.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Outsource the law enforcement!
Nice idea, but you are not a lawyer.
Depending on the situation, it is possible to design a system where most of the employees of the offshore organization do not have access to the sensitive data.
Will give you an example of a system that is currently working:
- customer can use web interface to order service, of course all the personal information is encrypted and never exposed to any CSRs.
- customer calls and orders some service. CSRs take all the non-sensitive information and are transferred to an interface where you punch in sensitive information from your phone e.g. credit card number. Only thing CSRs get once this operation is complete is some authorization token that they can use to complete the transaction.
- the problem is that in their need to search for cheapest offshore service companies sometime choose the lowest bidder or do not audit the offshore operations (or as you saw in the story there are number of indirections).
My solution is just not to have £200,000.
Laws requiring data protection, or restricting offshoring in any way, hurt the Bottom Line, so they will never be allowed to pass.
Post your link to the source of this "news". I can't find it on Google. Link not to a rightist blogger or Freerepublic, but a to a transcript of the comment, WITH CONTEXT, or at least an article from a credible news source referring to this. No, Rush is not acceptable. And he does not provide transcripts, anyway.
And as for Dobbs, he has indeed jumped onto the rightist train and is riding for the sunset, so his attitude as a "journalist" is indeed up for comment. He's dropped the mask of a reporter and has become a right-wing agitator. So it goes.
At Daily Kos or Talking Points Memo or even Buzzflash, the answer to the Drudge, they exhaustively document and link each reference to an actual news article from a credible source. "Everybody knows" is not credible as a source.
This "Franken is calling names" stinks of the old Orwellian trick of smearing the enemy with that which your side is most certainly guilty. If you know you can be called on your actions, make a lot of noise establishing "controversey" about those who will call you out, to diminish their stature. Slash, smear, distort, MAKE NOISE, and the enemy's best efforts to expose your actions can be at best summed up as calling the kettle black by those whose knowledge of the discussion is not exactly exhaustive.
Air America Radio,, with Franken as midday host, has done more to clean the rightist clocks in one year than the entire Democratic party has done in twenty.
That one free report per year PER AGENCY is available online, no writing letters and waiting. So, you can go to the website once every 4 months and get a report from one of the agencies for free.
Available in the west and midwest for now, by September it will be available throughout the US.
Linkage:
https://www.annualcreditreport.com/
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
It's all very interesting, workers in another country, that have very oppressing poverty, are given access to very private and personal information of the citizens of a very wealthy nation. In addition, the workers really have no reason to like the wealthy nation, because the impression they have is the nation exports war and exploitation. Duh!
7 45219&tid=158&tid=103&tid=17
I also read this article: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/23/1
Cendant just outsourced their programmers who worked at Galileo to India. I don't have all the details but I do know that most of those programmers were walked out. It's safe to say that the workers in India will now have access to 25% of all PNR's generated in the United States and about 30% of the international market. So the next time terrorists strike at the airlines they could know exactly who's on board. Their names and addresses and credit card numbers etc. etc.
I agree with that as well, which is why I stated that it shouldn't be difficult for host countries to do at least as good of a job. In fact, anything except for outright support would probably be good enough. Nevertheless, there are plenty of places where the government itself has more important things to do than worry about its citizens cheating Americans.
I am the victim of identity theft and would have had more problems had a nice clerk at Sears not questioned the fact that someone needed to apply for a card and then buy three laptops and four video cameras in Florida when their home address was Maryland. Now I pay for a fraud watch service and can no longer apply for quick credit (which I seldom did anyway and much of the fraud could be eliminated if there were no such thing as "quick credit").
I have little doubt the my problem can be traced back to a wonderful institution of higher learning that demanded we put our entire SSN on course assignements and used it openly as a student ID #.
If you put money in a bank you have to face it. Your personal information is being stored in either Bangalore or Beijing and subject to the laws of those countries.
We all know it but we still act suprised whenever identity theft happens and it ends up unpunished because India and China don't have the same notion of private property that we have.
This was posted right here on slashdot a few days back. It's the same damn story. Is slashdot being sponsored by an anti-outsourcing lobby to tarnish India's image?
2 45 &tid=98&tid=172
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/08/061
This can be considered an example of how outsourcing could improve things. Although slashdot hasn't outsourced it's editing, we still get duplicate news stories posted here. Outsourcing the slashdot editors could only improve the quality of slashdot.
I feel medical transcription is innapropriate to outsource, onshore or offshore.
This is extremely private information and at the gastly prices we pay to get medical care in the US, at the very least afford to pay a typist within their clinic/hospital.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Why don't you go back to your sewer, curry.
Funny, I thought it was the right wing in this country that was into "free trade" and "globalization". Dobbs is clearly opposed to these. He is clearly not a "rightist" in the American sense of the word.
I didn't know France was a sewer. Plus, I don't even know what you mean by 'curry'.
But I did know AC was not that smart.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I wondered what happens if someone is rich enough to: own their home (no mortgage and will never need one), they never need loans or pay credit card interest? A person like that should just make sure that the thief is not stealing from them and that does not seem to hard to do (e.g a credit card charge can be disputed and there will be no valid signature meaning that the merchant got cheated not you).
Will bad credit influance you in any other way but preventing getting loans mortgages? Will it really affect medical insurance, employment, school admission, your family?
This story is a dupe. (Yes, these are the same story. If you visit the links you 'll know)
Yes, but you first must PROVE that it was somebody else. That's the hard part.
It's not about right and wrong. It's about power and sovereignty.
So a site whoes comment when some US contractors were killed was to call them "mercenaries" and people could just "Screw them" is a credible news source?
It's a lot easier to perpetrate identity theft against Americans via Indian call centers than it is in the U.S. Also if the people providing the data are paid a substantial amount of money for it, that's more likely to mean something in an impoverished nation like India than it does in the U.S. Why does crime exist in the U.S.? By and large its based on socio-economic factors and someone wanting to improve their station in life. That's why you're a lot more likely to see someone without a job robbing a liquor store as opposed to than the manager of a bank. Now look at places like India where the vast majority of the population of nearly 1 billion people live in abject poverty. Getting thousands of dollars in one fell swoop would certainly mean more in a third world country under these conditions. It doesn't mean that Indians are more likely to commit crimes but it does mean that there are a LOT more people living under the socio-economic factors that lead to most of the crime in the U.S. That along with the fact that India is NOT under U.S. jurisdiction (regardless of extradition agreements) and its in the same part of the world as Pakistan and Afghanistan (where enemies of the of United States exist in abundance)and you've got a very bad mixture of elements ready to combine. Personally, I think it should be against federal law to send the personal data of U.S. citizens abroad. If you agree with me then you can look up your representatives here http://www.webslingerz.com/jhoffman/congress-email .html and write them telling them what you think.
What's scarier about this is that money was transferred from actual bank accounts owned by these individuals. So, they may not have to clear up their credit report, instead they have to deal with their retirement savings disappearing. Instead of just explaining why there is a faulty line on their credit report to a bank officer to get a mortgage, they'd have to find someplace else to come up with the down payment. UGH.
Makes me want to remove all my money from compaines who use offshore call centers, and into the local credit union where it is "safe" -- or at least, insured by FDIC.
I don't know about racism. But the statement about *legal* H-1B visas immigrants don't pay taxes is pure BS!!! I have paid taxes ever since I got into this country. I was on a F-1, and then H-1B. And I don't get any tax ride-off that the citizens do. In fact, I don't know a single legal immigrant on H-1B who is not paying more taxes than Americans every freaking year. And there are usually no complaints because we know how much of a previlage it is to live in this country. That doesn't mean that people can just wantonly lie about us and use us as scapegoats for their own incompetance and laziness.
If he knows a tax loop-hole that I don't know about please Fvcking tell me, cuz I would love to know. Also, I've paid Social Security for 8 years now, without qualifying for any of the benefits!!!! That actually pisses me off more than Lou Dobb's statement.
It may be wrong, but a quick search on H1-B sites should how it could legally be done, but how is it racist?
hence, it can't really be logged (it is audio-visually recorded but there's nothing not-allowed about accessed info). guess what they do log...sales pitches. probably so that the company can catch ppl falsely signing up customers for programs/offers OR tell the customer he/she did say yes to an offer so all charges are valid.
ppl who've been around longer and have had time to "bond" with the parent (cc) company's ppl usually have skills/info they shouldn't have. things like that should remain with the parent company...regardless of the location of either of them.
i'm sure there's some fine print somewhere that says signing up for a card gives them the right to do almost anything with ur data short of public announcements.
tip: fees are waived/reduced only if u ask for it