There is no getting around – we hate call centers, especially those that are run by companies in foreign countries; but now it seems that we might also have good reason to lower our trust level even further when it comes to dealing with them.
Reporters for The Sunday Times went undercover in India recently and discovered that there are some people at these call centers who have no qualms about selling private information for pennies on the dollar.
When the reporters met with two purported IT workers they were offered 45 different types of data that had been gathered from victims. This information included names, phone numbers, credit card details, and addresses which could be made for as little as 3¢ for each record.
As one of the data thieves bragged:
“These [pieces of data] are ones that have been sold to somebody already. This is Barclays, this is Halifax, this is Lloyds TSB. We’ve been dealing so long we can tell the bank by just the card number.”
Much of the information was also claimed to be no older than at least 72 hours and included information on insurance policies, mobile phone contract, mortgages and more.
Police in India claim that it is difficult for them to investigate this kind of data theft because the companies involved are unwilling to go public and admit that customer data has been compromised this way.
