In short, the story is like this. An Indian worker at a Bangalore call centre of HSBC, allegedly, supplied customer information to fraudsters. The fraudsters used this information in UK to take away the money from 16-20 UK based customers' account. These customers suffered a loss of more than £230,000 ($420,000). The worker in India has been identified and arrested. The good thing is that HSBC is going to compensate all the clients who suffered loss from this incident.
When I was searching through Google News about Indian items, I got shocked to see the amount of coverage being given to this news item. Google News listed more than 50 news sources about this item by the time I am writing this post and I can easily realize that by the end of today, the number of sources may become 150 or even 200. It was just the bad action of one worker out of 6,000 employees of HSBC in India who are engaged into call center and other back office related services but the damage for Indian BPO sector is immense.
I feel that this fraud incident is one of the worst news for outsourcing sector of India. Thousand of workers are now involved in this sector and it seems that more and more foreign companies are now eager to send their jobs to India. Fortunately, until now, not too many fraudulent activities have been carried out by the workers in India. I am quoting here from a report of Times Online:
" Last year, when The Sun bought account details of 1,000 British customers for £3 a time from an IT worker in Delhi, the bank assured customers its call centre in Bangalore was secure.
At the time Richard Beck, head of group external relations at the bank, said: "We believe any information in relation to HSBC customers was accessed through other companies dealing with our customers in the course of their normal business, not from HSBC staff in India or elsewhere."
The reputation of the industry was further tarnished when Australian Broadcasting Corporation current affairs programme Four Corners was able to obtain not just the names and addresses of Australian customers but also telephone numbers, birth certificate details, Medicare numbers, driving licence numbers and ATM card numbers."
These incidents are serious but yet to become a regular trend and even in USA and UK these kinds of problems happen all the time. However, there is no room for complacency and Indian government and industry leaders should take this matter very seriously from now and try to find a solution to the problem. Naturally, this incident will make the opponents of outsourcing in the west more vocal. Until now, they used to oppose outsourcing by saying that because of outsourcing of jobs to India, many people in the west are losing their own jobs. Now they can say that outsourcing is not a safe practice.
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Dear Sir,
I took personal loan from HSBC for Rs 40000/-(loan a/c no is 072-22941-542). During signing of agreement they took sign blankly. Also % is not told to us. After 9 emi including of June payment, I went HSBC BANK to clear remaining balance they told I has to pay Rs 38022.I shocked & i asked how it that, they said it is there policy. I paid Rs 18981 till now as monthly emi Rs 2109 starting from 1/10/06.There is no proper rule to control theses banks .plz could u take some steps to control these type of banks to stop, further cheating indians.plz I want at least it should not happen to any Indians in future. I feel some action will taken on private banks interest policy
Posted by: MANJUNATHA.L | June 8, 2007 8:07 AM | Permalink to Comment