Indian Call Centre Worker Sells Customer Details

lxt writes "A British tabloid newspaper managed to buy the personal details of over 1000 bank customers from an off-shore call centre based in Delhi. An IT worker at the call centre handed over details at £4.25 per customer, as well as credit card numbers and account passwords. He claimed could sell over 200,000 account details every month. The British police force has passed on details to Interpol and the Indian authorities, in an attempt to prosecute the individual. The BBC is also covering the story."

Comments

Well

[kutsu119]

Well, it was to be expected, outsourcing the jobs to a low paid area - workers that are paid fairly are less likely to cheat their employees.

Get rid of the call centers, keep them in the country that they expect to be dealing with (UK call centers for UK clients etc)

Re:Well

[muellerr1]

Like this could never happen in the US or the UK. Nobody wants this sort of thing to happen, least of all the Indian government. They like the influx of foreign money, and they'll work hard to keep the foreign companies happy and safe to keep that money flowing in. Or at least the appearance of being happy and safe.

Re:Well

[aml666]

It's true that this can and has happened in the US (aol...). The difference is that when you do a crime in the US, the FBI and local agencies have jurisdiction.

When crime happens to US citizens in a foreign country, we report it and hope for the best. If it happens here (US) the various agencies can force the company to change practices and enforce corporate security.

Re:Well

[AnObfuscator]

Not really. Halliburton, Enron, Aldelphia, AOL Time Warner, Arthur Andersen... All these scandals were pulled off not by disgruntled underpaid employees, but by high-paid execs.

It's like the old quote, "how much money is enough? A little bit more." Basically, you can't *pay* someone to be honest. If someone is greedy, more money won't satisfy him.

also, I'd like to point out that the workers in idea *are* being paid fairly. A fair wage is based on cost-of-living for where you live. Thus, they make *great* salaries compared to most of their countrymen. Their standard of living is *high* for their region. Most of them are quite grateful for their comparatively high-paid jobs.

The problem with concentration

[jockm]

Decades ago it was the waiter or waitress at the restaurant we used to worry about. When mail order began to grow, it was the person at the other end of the line of a mail-order company. Outsourcing (in country or out of country) is just a form of concentration of this phenomena.

Sending potentially valuable information to people in a high stress, low paying job (in country or out of country, my wife worked in a call center in college) with poor controls is a risk. We have known this since the beginning, but we just seem to relearn the lesson each time.

Barking up the wrong tree

[dajak]

The British police force has passed on details to Interpol and the Indian authorities, in an attempt to prosecute the individual.

They are barking up the wrong tree. If only the individual in another jurisdiction is liable to sanction, why is it allowed for British banks to move personal information to foreign countries in the first place? Shouldn't the bank be fined for failing to protect personal information of British citizens?

Abuse of power by employees is not something new or interesting, but the accountability issue is. Personal information should only be moved between countries with similar protections against abuse. Having said this, I don't know anything about British law on this issue.