The British banking industry was scrambling to restore consumer confidence and tighten security on Thursday, after a ring of Indian call center workers was exposed for selling private information from UK bank accounts.
The Sun newspaper reported that Kharan Bharee, described as a Delhi-based computer expert, was buying the PIN and credit card numbers, private addresses and passport details of UK account holders from call center employees, then selling them to would-be identity thieves.
The paper's undercover reporter claimed to have purchased confidential account details of 1,000 Britons for around ?3 (US$5.46) each.
In response, big British banks and building societies, including Lloyds TSB, HSBC and Barclays, were on Thursday working with City of London police to address apparent security breaches, while reassuring customers that the outsourcing of call centers to India was, by and large, a safe practice.
"We have strict procedures in those call centers whereby staff are required to put all belongings in a locker and can't take bags or mobile phones to work stations," a Lloyds TSB spokesperson said.
"They should not have access to information like passport details and bank passwords ... so we are investigating how this has happened. The first we heard about it was when we were contacted by City of London police. We are taking the allegations very seriously," the spokesperson said.
Lloyds TSB, like many other big banks, has sub-contracted its call center operations to India, where cheap labor and favorable tax laws save the company millions each year. And while some banking officials reaffirmed their faith in the practice on Thursday, City of London police warned that cases of identity theft from Indian call centers were not new phenomena.
Meanwhile, Kiran Karnik, chief of India's leading software corporation, the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), maintained India was a "trustworthy" destination for the outsourcing of call centers.
Karnik also told reporters that NASSCOM would help authorities in pursuing call center workers involved in illegal selling of customer information.
But despite those assurances, Steven Philippsohn, senior partner and head of fraud litigation at the London law firm Philippsohn Crawfords and Berwald, warned that companies risked exposing the confidential information by outsourcing call centers.
"The hazard with offshore operations is that data protection laws are often not in place and are difficult to enforce," Philippsohn said.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
Conflict with Taiwan could leave China with “massive economic disruption, catastrophic military losses, significant social unrest, and devastating sanctions,” a US think tank said in a report released on Monday. The German Marshall Fund released a report titled If China Attacks Taiwan: The Consequences for China of “Minor Conflict” and “Major War” Scenarios. The report details the “massive” economic, military, social and international costs to China in the event of a minor conflict or major war with Taiwan, estimating that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could sustain losses of more than half of its active-duty ground forces, including 100,000 troops. Understanding Chinese
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
RSS