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.

In addition to credit card numbers, Chandak was also offering passport numbers, driving license numbers and personal banking details, the report alleged.

In a separate meeting, Chandak offered the details of 8,000 British mobile phone users. He even apparently had tapes of customers being called at home from a call center.

A second New Delhi-based middleman known as Ghufran was offering details of customers with Halifax, Nationwide, Woolwich, Bank of Scotland and NatWest for £ 5 each. The details are believed to have been obtained from purchases using cards, the report claimed.

Ghufran claimed the information was obtained by technical support staff which visited call centers and used memory sticks to download recent sale transactions.