Credit card information, medical and financial records offered for sale to criminals and marketing companies as little as 2 p.
Two of the consultants, who claim to be IT workers in call centers, met with several undercover reporters from The Sunday Times and boasted of having 45 different sets of personal information about 500,000 Britons.
The data include names, addresses and phone numbers of holders of credit cards, start and expiration codes and three digit security verification.
The information - which is largely related to customers in major financial firms, including HSBC and NatWest - would be a gold mine for criminals, allowing fraudsters to siphon thousands of pounds from bank accounts in a matter of minutes.
IT consultant Naresh Singh met undercover reporters in a hotel room in Gurgaon, a city near Delhi, carrying a laptop full of data.
He said: "These [pieces] of the data are those that have been sold to someone already. This is Barclays, this is Halifax, this is Lloyds TSB. We've been trying so long we can say that the bank only by the number of card.
He said many of the data would be less than 72 hours old, adding: ". They just have gotten the credit card and not just credit cards, which would be the debit card as well '
Other information that was sold around unscrupulous workers was sensitive material about mortgages, loans, insurance, mobile phone contracts, subscriptions to Sky TV, according to the sting of the Sunday Times.
The data allow the direct marketing companies to target customers more effectively.
Call centers are an industry of £ 3.2 billion in India, with an estimated 330,000 people employed by them.
Many British companies outsource to India, but a public backlash over the use of foreign workers has been to some retirees.
The Spanish bank Santander, which owns Abbey, announced last year it would stop using call centers in India.
Indian officials say their efforts to combat corruption have been hampered by the unwillingness of companies interested in avoiding negative publicity, loss of data recording.
The Government is called to take action against widespread reports of insecure data.
Conservative Member of the accounts of the commons "public select committee, Richard Bacon, MP, said there was only a matter of the organizations involved, but also to the authorities.
He appealed to the British Government to investigate the latest allegations.
Mail Online
0 comments:
Post a Comment