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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."
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.
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.
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
Identity theft by foreign thieves is scarier because the US legal system and police systems alone aren't sufficient to track them down. International crime has jurisdictional issues, and you have no guarantee that the authorities in whatever country you're dealing with will cooperate, or even have the means to do so. This isn't an "outsourcing is bad because foreigners can't be trusted" problem, it is a "outsourceing is bad because the same rules that protect US customers need not apply". Anything that makes getting away with identity theft easier / harder to prosecute makes the situation worse.
So you think that the Indian authorities would be soft on this sort of crime because the victims aren't Indian citizens? Please.
If anything - and I speak with a great deal of personal knowledge about the country having travelled there many times - they're probably more vigilant about crimes against westerners than they are about crime in general.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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
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.
...and the fact is, we already have so little control over our personal information, that I have to concur with the assertion.
Is it nationalist or racist? I don't know really. I just don't want all of my information out of control. It shouldn't be legal to sell personal information in the first place. "Credit history" and like information has become a very abused business and falls neatly within the predictions of disaster by the people who protested this system decades ago. Has it improved our lives? Our economy? Anything?
It made rich people richer and citizens into 'consumers.'
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.
The question isn't whether identity theft and/or fraud is illegal (though that may be a problem here), but the matter of enforcement as a deterent. Frankly, it's a lot easier to get away with crimes when they cross national borders. Don't steal too much at a time and you'll probably be safe.
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
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".
Even though this specific case of extortion involves private information threating to be made public, it's not blackmail, as the person being extorted is not the one towards who the information is damaging...they'd just be hurt because the release of the information would result in a PR nightmare, not because the public would know the content of the information.
I.e., if you're being blackmailed, you don't want the information out at all, whereas in this case they simple didn't want themselves traced to any leak, and could care less if people got the information from someone else. Hence it's a different kind of extortion, not blackmail.
However, many kinds of 'extortion' are legal. It depends one whether or not she had the legal right to release the information. Assuming there are no data privacy laws, the only thing forbidding it would be her contract, and the company broke the contract already by refusing to pay her, so she's certainly not obligated to follow it.
In fact, refusing to hold up your end of the contract when the other party refuses to hold up theirs only makes sense.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
And the rest of your comment is a "Marxist Polyanna" type of thing, something you must have cut-and-pasted from some play for kids in Stalinist Russia.
The result was an inflation that eventually topped 200% in a month
Of course the real answer is that both of you are correct. The inflation did go out of control, The laborers did in fact restart the abandoned factories. The latter did help to contain the former: the worker-owned factories paid lower wages (remember, these were people who now had zero income, and a low wage is better than zero) and produced less expensive goods, countering inflation, much as Wal-Mart has done in the US (without being worker-owned).
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?