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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."
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
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I think incidents like this are tiny examples of what's to come.
Exactly. It's already been proven in Argentina after the financial collapse there (brought about by too much outsourcing and too many large tax breaks given to foreign big business by President Menos, btw). One evening, all the foreign multinationals, including the banks, emptied their safes, chained the doors, and fled the country under cover of darkness. The next morning, the workers showed up to work and found they were all out of jobs. After sitting around moping for a while, they said "screw it", kicked the doors of the now-vacant factories down, started up the machines, and continued producing their product. They pay themselves all an equal wage, out of the profits. They call it fabrica ocupada, "occupied factory". Please note that Argentina was very prosperous, comparable to Canada or Australia.
Now the old owners have found out that the workers are able to cut prices on their products (while still maintaining quality), because the wages of the owners and the management perqs -- golf trips, planes and whatnot are actually the biggest wasteful overhead -- and demand possession of their abandoned factories back in order to stop the "people" from competing with them (they still make their goods elsewhere and ship them into Argentina).
Do you always enjoy copying and pasting your own comments from previous articles? Post from 4 days ago
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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!
*What kind of Americans keep that much British money around?*
anyone who wants his money to keep it's value...
but anyways, the real reason for £ is that it's a UK.yahoo story.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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.
Now, US is threatening other countries to cut aid if they don't exempt US citizens. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A132 57-2004Nov25.html
I guess it is OK for the US to jail citizens of other coutries WITHOUT a trial http://www.notinourname.net/restrictions/prez-powe rs-16apr04.htm, but it is not OK for others to put Americans on trial...
Saying this is not right must be a troll?