Indian BPO data theft probe underway

"An investigation by the Indian police is already underway and we call upon Dispatches full and complete cooperation with their inquiries," said Sunil Mehta, vice president, National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), the premier trade body and the chamber of commerce of the IT software and services industry.

On October 5, UK-based Channel 4 aired the program titled 'The Data Theft Scandal,' a part of its investigative series 'Dispatches,' which showed that middlemen were offering to supply credit card numbers, passwords and other information for as little as $ 15 and as much as $ 55 per customer.

They said they could supply information on hundreds of thousands of people, obtained from a number of commercial call-centres.

Data for customers at most major UK banks were offered for sale, although the information was not obtained from bank call-centres but through call centres for certain mobile phone companies, whose customers had provided financial information.

According to Channel 4, a middleman named Sushant Chandak offered to sell a database with the credit card details of 2,00,000 people as commercial "leads." At a meeting in Calcutta, he seems to have boasted of a network of agents in call centers across India.