Sex and Indian BPO data security risks exposed again

Your life for sale

By OLIVER HARVEY
and SUN ONLINE REPORTER

CROOKED call centre workers in India are flogging details of Britons’ bank accounts, a Sun probe has found.

Our undercover reporter Oliver Harvey was sold the top secret information on a thousand accounts, and numbers of passports and credit cards.

And today City of London police launched an investigation after receiving a dossier of information from The Sun giving details of the banks whose security may have been compromised.

A number of high street banks including Barclays, the Woolwich, HSBC and Lloyds TSB, said they were working with police.

Harvey, who paid a total of 5,000 US dollars (£2,750) for the information and was asked for another £275 to be sent later, was told details usually cost £4.25 but he was getting a special deal.

Karan Bahree, who said he got the details from a network of call centre workers in Delhi, also boasted that he could get up to 2,000 account details a month.

The information received included account holders’ addresses, secret passwords, credit card details, passports and driving licence information.

In some cases there were also the issue and expiry dates of bank cards, as well as the three digit security number from the back of the card.

A spokeswoman for the City of London Police said: "All the financial institutions identified have been fully informed of the situation.

"An investigation is now under way. Therefore it would be inappropriate for us to provide further details at this stage."

The spokeswoman said The Sun handed police the names of banks that might have been compromised following an investigation into the security of financial information held at foreign call centres.

"At this stage we are not fully aware of the breadth of what we are going to be investigating.

"We have been handed information and it is being reviewed."