[Flipside]

Ok, as some of you may be aware, British Newspapers have a habit of sending 'snoops' into private places, be it Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace or Prince Williams army barracks.

Their latest little trick was to buy the Bank Account details, including name, address etc of 1000 people from one of the UK banks many outsourced call centres in India....

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CROOKED call centre workers in India are flogging details of Britons’ bank accounts, a Sun probe has found.
Our undercover reporter Oliver Harvey was sold the top secret information on a thousand accounts, and numbers of passports and credit cards.

And today City of London police launched an investigation after receiving a dossier of information from The Sun giving details of the banks whose security may have been compromised.

A number of high street banks including Barclays, the Woolwich, HSBC and Lloyds TSB, said they were working with police.

Harvey, who paid a total of 5,000 US dollars (£2,750) for the information and was asked for another £275 to be sent later, was told details usually cost £4.25 but he was getting a special deal.

Kkaran Bahree, who said he got the details from a network of call centre workers in Delhi, also boasted that he could get up to 2,000 account details a month.

The information received included account holders’ addresses, secret
passwords, credit card details, passports and driving licence information.

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Now, I'll stress here that the Sun is known for instigating panics as well a barely concealed racism at times, but still, being a customer who's details have probably been sent abroad, this is obviously cause for concern.

I don't blame the workers in India, the whole ethos of sending the work abroad was something along the line of... 'Well the Fuzzywuzzy's will work for pittance, or pitta bread, dontcherknow.'. So, in a way, I hope this brings really really bad publicity to the banks and make them realise the only reason they are so rich is because it's our money they are using to sail the stockmarket.

The downside of this is that, knowing the Sun, it will now go on to brand the entire Indian call centre Network as some kind of underground ID stealing monopoly, they like generating racial hatred like that, and will, most likely, cost the jobs not only of the guilty, but quite a few of the innocent or duped as well.



Thoughts/Opinions?

[aldo_14]

I can't really disagree.

The Sun makes a good point in the potential for identity theft, especially outside the area of the EU (and UK) data protection acts.  Of course, they will then obscure the validity of that point by ignoring it and using it as an excuse to brand the entire subcontinent as data stealers and probably claim they'll come over here and take benefit, or something.

It's also probably pretty inevitable (some of the) staff will take advantage to do things like this, because they're only hired because they will work for pathetically low wages.

The banks have to realise that, if they want us to be willing customers we want call-centres, etc, based in the UK.  For the simple reason that they can understand the culture, accents, local nuances better than a foreign worker with 10 hours of Eastenders can.  After all, I can confuse an American or Ozzie in about 10 minutes if I drop into Scotticisms; how will it be for a non-native speaker?

[karajorma]

Sounds like a load of xenophobic crap to me. For $5000 dollars I'll bet any half decent reporter could get the same details from a british call centre.

Call centre workers are paid a pitance and for the equivalent of 1/4 of a year's wage I'll bet you could find someone corruptable. It's just easier to do in India.

[Flipside]

Agreed Kara, from a personal point of view it's not so much where it's taking place that concerns me, but the fact that my bank is handing information to external companies without permission. If you dangle bait like that, someone is going to bite, be it in the UK, India or anywhere else for that matter.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by karajorma
Sounds like a load of xenophobic crap to me. For $5000 dollars I'll bet any half decent reporter could get the same details from a british call centre.

Call centre workers are paid a pitance and for the equivalent of 1/4 of a year's wage I'll bet you could find someone corruptable. It's just easier to do in India.

Fair point.

My main concern is over the data protection laws vis-a-vis the ones in the UK and indeed across the EU; simply whether they are as stringent (and as stringently enforced).

[karajorma]

Oh I agree that this is a valid expose from the Sun. We should be worried about this kind of security lapse.

My worry is with the nationalistic slant being put on things.

 It's in the Bank's own interest to tighten up the security on these call centres anyway as they are the ones who'll end up losing money from frauds that result in loss of data. This is most likely yet another case of a bank realising that its security isn't anywhere near as good as it should be rather than any kind of reflection on the flaws of outsourcing

 (c.f. citibank's missing unencrypted back up tape containing details of 4 million customers and their policy of simply mailing them through the regular US postal service).