Who takes the Credit?

The industry has been facing 'repeated security failures' and 'shocking data protection breaches'.
Swank offices, smart young people, fat pay cheques and more — even if a month ago these were the things most associated a BPO with, the picture has certainly changed. The extent of the illegal trade in sensitive data was exposed in an undercover sting by a documentary crew for Britain's Channel 4 wherein the channel busted a racket in which a Kolkata guy Sushant Chandak was caught selling confidential data of people holding accounts in foreign banks to middlemen, who in turn used the data for illegal transactions.
This second case follows close on the heels of another case. Sulagna Roy, 23, an employee of a call centre the city's IT hub at Sector V of Salt Lake, was arrested from her James Long Sarani residence in south Kolkata on charges of cheating foreign nationals by using their credit card numbers and shopping for goods worth Rs 200,000, about $4,300. Roy allegedly duped 42 US clients of the call centre and purchased everything from chocolate to an air conditioner.
The two recent cases have certainly put most call centres in the city on a wake up call mode as they are all geared up to prevent their image from being tarnished further. "Since we are a nascent industry, we are always under the scanner. Considering the fact that we handle so many international clients, this is but natural. Law enforcement agencies need to be trained in potential areas of security fraud so that when an incident occurs, the police has some idea of the problem," says Sandeep Chaudhuri of a global IT firm.
But what works behind these cases of fraud? "One should keep in mind the average age of these call centre workers that range between 19 and 25. The lure of money often becomes hard to resist for people in this age group. Even if such profile fraud cases are a rarity, selling of data at every level happens at every level. Proof of this is the number of calls you continue to receive from credit card divisions, the mobile companies and the like," says Roopal Das Kabiraj, business manager of a global software company. And carrying out these frauds can be as simple as taking a pen drive to work, loading the data on them and selling it for a fee.
The city police, too, are up on their feet in search of the middlemen through which cases of fraud are mostly carried out. While Rajeev Kumar, DIG, CID Operations, refused to divulge details of the case procedure, he said, "We are doing our best to convict these kind of criminals. However, the basics have to be done by the companies themselves. The matter of concern is actually the rise in the number of unregistered call centres in the city." To the uninitiated, while registered call centre figures add up to 19 in the city, the Bengal CID cell has no clue about the number of unregistered call centres.
However, the uppermost thing on most BPO minds is the impact such cases will have on the roaring outsourcing business. "Business will certainly be affected. The reason why the outsourcing industry has grown in leaps and bounds is because of the cheap skilled labour available here," says Kalyan Kar, MD of a non-voice BPO based in Salt Lake. Industry officials say workers are frisked and banned from bringing in mobile phones, pens and paper, cameras and even music players to prevent them fro sneaking out valuable information.
They also undergo background checks, sign non-disclosure agreements and attend courses on customer secrecy. Analysts, however, say the latest incident raises questions on security in call centres, and could make the case stronger for those who are against outsourcing of jobs to countries like India.