Indian Call Centre Worker Sells Customer Details 425
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."
Well (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Outsourcing sucks. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with concentration (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of this story is what exactly, that everyone has their price ?
Re:Damn. (Score:1, Insightful)
It really is going to be the wild wild west for a while.
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Like this could never happen in the US or the UK
My thoughts exactly. And I'd suggest that the number of UK call-centre employees being paid "fairly" is debateable - high if you believe the employers, low if you believe everyone else. This kind of crap strikes me as racism: unscrupulous employees exist in every country of the world; bad wages exists in every country; opportunities to commit fraud exist everywhere. I really hope this "outsourcing means Johnny Furrinner is stealing my job" crap is going to end soon, so we can focus on (all) our working conditions.
(Aside: I'm an "economic migrant" working in the UK. Originally from NZ, I've lived in the UK since 1979 and in Glasgow since 1990. I've encountered far less racism/hostility than many Glaswegians, simply because I'm white and my accent sounds Scottish - and not the Asian-Scottish that makes many Scots a target for racist tossers).
Show your evidence! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Lowest bidder indeed (Score:2, Insightful)
This being the case the only reason we are not reading about a worker in a Call Centre in Edinburgh selling private information is because The Sun has not been up to Edinburgh with a suitcase of cash and offered it to anyone.
I've worked in a few Call Centres in the UK and I'm sure there are a good number of people who would be happy to sell you whatever you wanted for the right price. You just might have to pay them a little more than you would pay the Indian.
Re:Well (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah Right.
So that is why Barings Bank, Enron, Worldcom/MCI and other pillars of trustworthiness only exist in high paid sectors?
Outsourcers guilty of offense: Data Protection Act (Score:5, Insightful)
The act *is* flawed in that it allows data to be sent to countries without similar data protection if they have a contract in place, it shouldn't allow that in the first place. But the contract in place with the oursourcing organisation should make sure that they have sufficient safeguards in place to stop this, the fact that it's happening says that the outsourcing companies are in breach of contract and the banks haven't put sufficient safeguards in place, an offence against the data protection act, 1998.
We need some prosecutions against CIOs, CEOs and the like. A couple of years in prison would improve their attitude to data protection.
Scum (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
What I think people are saying is that there seems to be a higher amount of information sales now that companies have outsourced. And without jurisdiction we don't like it. Not that Indians are more criminally active just that they know and we know the reason they have a job....they will be getting paid the lowest salary of anyone in the world for doing their job and they know it won't improve cause the company will just pack up and leave.
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Well (Score:1, Insightful)
In a bid to reduce cost, the UK company outsources, yet does not setup procedures to make sure the customer data is safe. IMHO, it could have happened anywhere in the world, even in the UK.
Re:Outsourcing sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ah... The benefits of outsourcing (Score:3, Insightful)
Aside from the facts that the vast majority of educated Indians can speak English, most of them aren't particularly anti-American, and you sound like a complete bigot, you may have had a point.
Bitter much?
Human Nature + a Badly Designed System (Score:2, Insightful)
If one employee can walk off with thousands of customers' private data, then the system is putridly designed.
Three things need to happen:
Just increasing the workers' pay is not going to help. They are already rich compared to most of their countrymen.
Barking up the wrong tree (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Gimme a break (Score:3, Insightful)
The way the world should work according to me (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally believe, however, that a company should still be required to enforce all regulations which protect the citizens of the source country (in this case, the UK). If it turns out the company is not able to force compliance with the governing regulation for whatever reason then it should be illegal to outsource that particular function. And if they are able to force compliance then the source company should be held liable for failure to comply by the outsourcing company with all of the associated penalties. The result would be that the source company could not avoid the cost of insuring regulations were followed and the outsourcing company would incur the cost of compliance as well.
This would have at least two effects. The cost of outsourcing would be more in line with competition in the source country and the citizens of the source country would not lose the protection afforded them by law.
Quality. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, things will even out. All the smaller outsourcing firms will lose out and only the big players will remain - they may charge more, but they also pay more and will usually have procedures in place that will prevent this sort of thing.
So you are saying that greedy managers everywhere have yet again been reminded of something the rest of us mortals already know? That quality costs money, even in outsourcing. What a surprise! Professionalism may cost less money in India but it will still costs more than average.
How is this a surprise? (Score:3, Insightful)
All people want to be able to make their lives better; for themselves and their family. When the impoverished see wealthy people eating steak, the bowl of gruel in front of them doesn't look very tasty. When people see something they really want, wether it's a plate of food or a life style, they will beg, borrow and steal to get it.
The solution? Companies need to pay people enough money that the employee can see they are making progress towards their dreams and goals, not just getting by from paycheck to paycheck.
It WILL get worse (Score:2, Insightful)
Off-shoring data entry was bad, off-shoring call centers marginally worse, but giving the ability to bring most of our monetary system's infrastructure to it's knees over to another country, any country, is a very,very bad idea.
The short-sightedness (is that a word?)of the concept baffles me. You find a off-shore person who will work for a fraction of the cost of his local counterpart and use him to replace the local guy. The off-shore asset doesn't pay taxes into the US system, he doesn't use the US facilities (banks, hospitals, insurance companies, etc) that he supports. The local guy no longer pays taxes, does drain the system elsewhere through aid programs, defaults on bank loans and credit cards, no longer can afford private insurance, defaults on hospital bills etc, doesn't buy the big ticket items (like cars) anymore, which drives up the cost of living for everyone. It's a downward spiral; sure, in the short term, corporate profits look better, but you've incurred basic erosion of the customer base. It happened in the textile, electronic and automoblie industries and those actually move hard goods back and forth. Moving ones and zeros across the wire it much easier, but potentially much more destructive.
I agree, this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Crime and Punishment (Score:4, Insightful)
In terms of law, India is /far/ more advanced than many countries in the world.
- Separation between religion and state (expressed in the constitution as the nation being secular) actually works in India unlike many countries. India currently has a Sikh Prime Minister and a Muslim President. Whats more, our Muslim President has an advanced enough and open enough view of religion that he is a scholar and a practitioner of the often contradictory Hinduism and Islam.
- India is the worlds largest democracy. There's a billion people in India, and there's no country with a population even close to it thats a democracy in which the democratic process works as well as it does in India. And you honestly think that a working democracy would make laws to chop hands off citizens?
- Like mentioned in a previous post, India has joined other progressive (read non-US) countries in placing more value on human life - the death penalty exists, but is very rarely used. I think in the past several years, 1 person has been executed.
Please quit making completely unwarranted, unjustified, and most of all, uneducated comments. Your time is better spent actually looking up some information Wikipedia or elsewhere on the web every now and then. There's nothing healthier than doing that.
Re:Ah... The benefits of outsourcing (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh right, the single largest English speaking nation in the world does not have an English speaking person in it. D'oh, how could I forget?
No kidding, that's why I love talkin to them Americans who hang up on me when I insist on talking to their managers, when they screw up. Uh, no.
Why we outsource our personal information to countries where the anti-American sentiment is extremely high is beyond me.
Here's why: it's cheaper to do so and plain economics dictates that your ridiculous labor costs make it cheaper to outsource it. And remember, anti-American sentiment is not generated in a vacuum. It is precisely the actions that your government carries out in the name of god knows what that leads to the kind of sentiment that it deserves. That's why there's an anti-American sentiment.
I hope for your sake you're being a sarcastic son of a bitch, because its misinformed prejuidced asses like yourself that lead to ill-informed protectionist people being put into office.
follow up on this (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Gimme a break (Score:2, Insightful)
Which is not surprising, considering that offshoring/outsourcing is such a contentious topic right now. The average person, with zero knowledge about Economics, already believes the Indians and the Chinese are going to rob them of their jobs. Now those dirt poor foriegners are going to take their credit card numbers as well. The hypocrisy is, as you point out, this happens every day in Western parent companies. Which is fine, because everyone would rather be embezzled by their neighbor than someone they don't know.
These stories are in poor taste, as they simply reinforce a nationalist xenophobia to sell papers. After all, "You're all going to lose your jobs to theives from India" sells better than "Everything will be fine in the long run."
Enron and Parmalat have shown us that no matter where you are on the corporate ladder, there are rotten branches on the tree.
The important thing to note is that the exectutives of Enron, Adelphia, WorldCom and Arthur Anderson were all edicted. As it stands, the United States is the most transparent economy in the world. Although a corruption scandal has become commonplace in the headlines, Americans do not tolerate visible corruption. The challenge to the emerging economies of Eastern Europe, China, and India is to emulate this.
And yet we still do nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
You give consent (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:2, Insightful)
I will never understand why some people feel the need to scream racism at every little thing they dont agree with. I like indians just fine, as long as I dont have to try to decipher thier horribly butchered english when im trying to let my cable company know my internet is out. Sure, I cant speak Hindu or whatever, but then im not fielding tech support calls for them either. Thank goodness.
Re:Lowest bidder indeed - about your own morals (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say your morals are pretty suspect in this.
Actually, they're not suspect at all. They're as bad as the people you let get away with these crimes.
Re:Gimme a break (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got to be kidding. Reporting a factual story is 'in poor taste'? This isn't the first time serious stories like this have come up. In the not so distant past....we had reports of a lady in India threatening to sell/release private medical information on US citizens if she wasn't paid some $$'s. And you seem to think that being nationalistic is something bad?? Why would anyone NOT want their country to come out on top? This life is a constant struggle, a perpetual contest to see who can win. Life IS competition, and frankly, I'd like to be on the winning side as often as possible. And while I don't advent keeping anyone down, I certainly am not altrusitic enough to want to give to others 'till it hurts'. I not only don't want others to succeed at our expense, but, I can't stand the fact that our country is actively hurting our citizens by thoughtlessly shipping our tech jobs overseas for a short term gain, but, losing sight of the long term detrimental effects....the main one being that if we don't have tech people working here, how will we continue to innovate? Already, we see the effects in that our young people are NOT working toward computer and other tech degrees as much as in the past.
"Which is not surprising, considering that offshoring/outsourcing is such a contentious topic right now. The average person, with zero knowledge about Economics, already believes the Indians and the Chinese are going to rob them of their jobs. Now those dirt poor foriegners are going to take their credit card numbers as well. The hypocrisy is, as you point out, this happens every day in Western parent companies. Which is fine, because everyone would rather be embezzled by their neighbor than someone they don't know."
to a point, you are right. Sure, there are criminal types all over the world. However, different cultures have different degrees of what they consider to be crimes. It does seem that India does not view privacy ideals, and minor theft of such as great of a crime as it is in the US by statute. Sure we have people that will do the same here in the US. However, we can catch them here and prosecute them. I doubt the same can be said of India. And lets face it...people in a country are going to be a bit more careful with treating their own people and their information than they will that of peoples of other countries. Someone that might be on the 'brink' of doing something wrong like this might think twice if it is a fellow countryman's info, rather than a foreigner's information.
And finally....you and others keep saying "In the long run, it will be better". Better for who? I cannot see how this benefits the US at all....shipping off jobs and creating unemployment for our citizens....giving no incentive for our young to go into tech fields..sure, we get some cheaper goods, but, in the end, if we have no decent paying jobs...who will be able to buy these cheap goods? Like I said, I have no problem with anyone in the world trying to improve their lot in life...but, not at my expense.
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah get off your socialist soap box. I have many reasons for disliking the outsourcing jobs to another country. One big one is half the time they cant understand me and I sure as hell cant understand them. Also, like someone before mentioned its harder to prosecute when stuff like this does happen.
Well that's me outed as a commie.
My point was that we can't have the *advantages* of capitalism without accepting the *disadvantages*.
My *mistake* was thinking that one can use words like "capitalism" without being a fully paid-up member of the Workers' International to Rebuild the Soviet Union [Marxist/Leninist branch].
I scream racism when we discuss outsourcing because very few of the arguments against make much sense. The only coherent argument I've heard (and one that I agree with) is that it's a pain to deal with a different dialect of English - and that applies when phoning Essex from Edinburgh, or Aberdeen from Andover.
Re:Ah... The benefits of outsourcing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
Similarly, in some societies, certain functionaries are paid a small salary, with the expectation that bribes will make up the difference, In some economies (perhaps dominated by hyper-inflation) , the honest worker may not receive enough money to pay his living expenses.
Certainly, Enron executives were well paid, so one could not seriously argue that corruption was neccesary for survival. However, in many cases, financial remuneration was based around a semi-reasonable base salary, and rather larger performance bonuses. Winning those bonuses required either financial acumen or a willingness to commit fraud. In many cases, the latter path was easier.
Re:Lowest bidder indeed - about your own morals (Score:2, Insightful)
The cashier didn't do it. The murderer did. He didn't scam people, his acquaintence did. Try to keep it straight, will you?
Re:Gimme a break (Score:3, Insightful)
By offshoring of jobs in the medical, insurance and banking fields, industries that will not expand based into the developing companies, except on a macro- or highest (read stockholder) level, we're effectively gutting the middle class's support of these industries.
If free trade is the argument, why do US (any parent country) companies routinely offer goods in these developing companies at a fraction of the cost to their US consumer counterparts in order to gain market share? How are these "loss leaders" paid for? By the US (any parent country) consumers.
By looking at the situation with rose-colored glasses and calling it free trade, you miss the underlying effects. The countries that are benefitting from the off-shoring don't reciprocate by exporting jobs, and overall don't usually utilize US (parent country) goods or services, instead the US (parent country) goods and services usually end up competing with government sponsored goods and services, which, by definition, must be below a competitive price point in order to be effectivly subsidized.
I agree that it is quite easy to move a "corporation" off-shore. But if a company has 15 executives and salesmen in the US and 1300 workers in another country, are they still a "US" company or should they be considered as such? Microsoft considers itself a US company, specifically a Washington state based company, but many of it's letters of incorporation are filed in Nevada, whereby they avoid over a $140 million in local Washington state taxes a year. They are "Redmond, Washington" in name only, and the land tax breaks that Washington gave them years ago in order to bring jobs to the area are being mitigated by Microsoft's increasing off-shoring of thier code work and slick legal wrangling. I can name several countries that will allow MS to relocate the corporation lock-stock-and letterhead to it's shores for a fraction of that. And based on US laws nothing precludes them from doing that, and still exploiting our market in such a monopolistic fashion....but it's free trade so that has to be good. Right?
Is mentioning Microsoft and monopoly in the same post the IT equivalent of Godwin's Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwin's_law [wikipedia.org]?
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Criminal sentencing in India needed (Score:1, Insightful)
The assumption that India values USA/UK citizens financial privacy is BS if there is no enforcement and no punishment or fines.
I want to know if the UK bank pulled all of its offshore work back to the UK.
The current method of the bank, credit card company, etc paying a fine to the federal government for each name lost, stolen, etc is wrong.
The bank, credit card company should pay each and every PERSON that had his/her data lost/stolen.
Avarice, not racism (Score:2, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with racism, but everything to do with the fact that the legal system is quite different and quite differently enforced than ours here in the west. Does India, Pakistan and other countries have HIPAA or even know what it is much less can the companies where such jobs, and information, has been outsourced to, be held liable in a western court of law for violating these laws? Doubtful.
And then there are the widespread sales of private information as has been reported both here in the states and abroad. Sure, we can outsource the work to a country who pays their workers perhaps 1/10th of what it would cost for the work to be performed by american workers but are the same background checks made and isn't there a greater temptation perhaps to supplement that income through industrial espionage?
Those are the excuses we're given here in the U.S. when they do background and credit checks that indicate that our credit histories may be a bit spotty.
It's got nothing to do with race or location but everything to do with human nature and avarice.