Australia Exposes the Obvious

I refuse to do business with any company that outsources their call centers to other countries. I've even canceled my REAL.com account because they run their calls through India. The first thing I ask when I'm ordering something or doing business by phone is where the operater is located. If they are outside our borders, I do an Emily Litella -- "NEVER mind!" Besides the loss of American jobs, here's why. If Australia has exposed this kind of fraud, you know it's going on here too. Where is the American media on this?

SYDNEY, Aug 15 (AFP) - Workers at call centres based in India are selling personal information which puts tens of thousands of people at risk of computer fraud, Australia's national broadcaster said Monday.

In an investigation for ABC Television's Four Corners programme, reporters were offered banking pin numbers, passport numbers, credit card details and other personal information on thousands of Australians.

The information would enable fraudsters to assume false identities for online transactions, the ABC said in a preview of the programme to be broadcast Monday night.

Former World Bank cyber intelligence expert Tom Kellerman is quoted as saying that cyber fraud is the most pervasive crime in the world. "Organised crime has created a business model around hacking," he said, adding that the Internet was becoming "more hostile" every day.

One call centre user, Keith Poole, told the programme that an operator working for Australian company Switch Mobile asked him for his passport number, which he refused to provide.

Switch Mobile spokesman Damien Kay said passport information was not needed and the company was shocked that privacy laws were being flouted by its representative in India.

"The issue of personal information being sold goes way outside of our authorisation in the contracts that we have," he told ABC. Four Corners said the information it was offered appeared to have come from a call centre based in the Indian city of Gurgaon.

Kiran Karnik, president of India's National Association of Software and Service Companies, told the programme that India was among the safest processing hubs around. "I can assure every Australian customer and consumer whose data is being processed or handled in India that in a comparative sense at least this is among the safest places," he said. "This industry as a whole, despite some breaches, has been fairly good."

An increasing number of large companies around the world use call centres in low-wage countries such as India to receive or make phone calls on their behalf.