The Sun unearths Indian call centre fraudulent activity |
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Thu, 23 Jun 2005 15:05
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London police are investigating claims that unscrupulous Indian call centre employees are selling confidential details of British bank accounts. The investigations followed a report in The Sun that one of its undercover journalists had bought secret bank details of 1000 British citizens for a little over £3 from a computer expert in Delhi.
According to the newspaper, victims of the information theft include customers of some of UK’s largest banks and financial businesses, including Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland and Halifax.
The paper said it had obtained addresses, passwords, phone numbers and details of credit cards, passports and driving licences from a computer expert in Delhi, who said he had contacts in various call centres, and bragged that he could sell up to 200,000 account details, including that of U.S. citizens, each month. In recent years, many British and U.S. businesses have outsourced thousands of back-office jobs to India to save on employee wages.
Confirming that investigations had begun, a spokeswoman for the London police, said: “While allegations made in the dossier are very serious, City of London Police would like to remind people that incidents of this kind are relatively rare.”
“As of now, the breadth of what we are going to be investigating is not clear,” she added.
The Indian call centre industry employs more that 300,000 call centre workers and back-office agents, who work for about a fifth of Western wages.
However, the industry suffered a blow in April when police arrested three employees for a $400,000 online credit card fraud in which Citibank customers were allegedly tricked into parting with their personal identification numbers.
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