INDIA: India's top software organisation has said it would help authorities to crack down on call centre workers who sell customer-related banking and credit card information as reported in the Sun earlier this week.
Kiran Karnik, chief of the National Association of Software and Service Companies, said India was a "trustworthy" outsourcing destination and would not let call centre workers get away with financial data theft exposed by a Sun reporter in a sting operation in New Delhi.
India's five-year-old Information Technology Act provides for stringent punishment for data theft, including prison terms of up to five years.
The Sun reporter paid a computer expert $5,000 to obtain account numbers, bank card details, secret passwords and other personal details like expiry dates and security numbers of some 1,000 British bank customers that could be used to make fraudulent purchases.
The information technology worker told the Sun he had obtained the information from a network of contacts inside call centres that have mushroomed in India, catering to UK and other western banks, credit card companies and financial institutions.
A handful of Irish commercial and information-based organisations too are believed to be outsourcing work to call centres in Bangalore. The sting was the second blow to the country's call centre industry that employs more than 350,000 people across some 600 locations at Bombay, nearby Pune in the west, Madras and Hyderabad in the south, and Delhi.
In April, Pune police arrested 16 Mphasis call centre employees for a $350,000 online credit card fraud in which Citibank customers were allegedly "persuaded" to part with their personal identification numbers.
Call centres claim to strictly enforce security amongst employees to prevent information leaks. All are provided specially configured personal computers without floppy drives or CD-rom, e-mail options or printers.
Employees are monitored on closed circuit television and not permitted to carry paper, mobile telephones or bags onto the operations floor. They are also periodically subjected to random searches. Most centres hire youngsters in their late teens or early 20s, paying them a monthly wage of between 12,000-15,000 rupees (€228-€285), several times the national average.