DISPATCHES UNVEILS INDIA'S DATA THEFT SCANDAL
(5 October 2006)

In last night's edition of documentary programme 'Dispatches' (5 October 2006), Sue Turton, senior reporter for Channel 4 News, investigated the Indian call centre security failures which allows personal financial details to be stolen and illegally traded. In a 12-month undercover investigation, Turton infiltrated criminal networks which trade British consumers' bank and other confidential information for huge profits in India, the world's new call centre capital.

Uncovering the methods used to thieve confidential data ranging from credit card numbers to passport details, Turton exposed the alarming security failures in a number of commercial call centres which allow detailed financial data on individuals to be gathered and sold on with ease. She discoverd shocking data protection breaches and a new phenomenon known as 'data farming' - the unauthorised 'harvesting' of personal data to be sold on or exchanged for profit.

This investigation also revealed the scale of some of the call centre scams as Turton is offered hundreds of thousands of 'hot leads', full banking and financial profiles, to purchase. Turton and her colleagues met with a number of scamsters willing to sell data and claim to have returned to the UK with a suitcase full of stolen credit card holder's records.

In the UK, Turton met a former data thief and people who have fallen victim to this international trade. She also showed her undercover footage and findings to a UK data protection lawyer who is appalled, saying: "You couldn't scare me more. This is as bad as it gets. This is evidence of serious criminal offences."

The programme has already forced Barclays to issue the following statement:

'Barclays has no higher priority than safeguarding the banking information of its customers. There has been no suggestion by Channel Four Dispatches that any of the information they have came from a Barclays operation. Customers regularly need to supply their bank or credit card account details to pay for goods and services and we have already asked the programme to share the information they have so that we can assist any customer who may have been impacted.

As a responsible bank, customers who are the innocent victims of fraud are covered by our anti-fraud guarantee. We adopt the same stringent approach to security whether work is being processed in the UK or another country.'