We've Been BPO'd

That is what the customers of some banks in the UK might say with regard to this. One more BPO scam. I'm however finding it difficult to believe. Two niggling things. One, the level of detail in the information supposed to have been sold:

addresses, passwords, phone numbers and details of credit cards, passports and driving licences which could be used to raid unsuspecting victims' accounts.

Passwords, details of driving licence and passport - and all that information given to a bank's call centre? As to the possibility that the call centre employee who leaked the information would have access to the database which contains all these details - even that is hard to believe since information would surely be given only on a need-to-know basis? The second niggle is about the price of the deal, under five thousand pounds. Surely it could have been more?

Bahree also offered to sell American customer details. He need not bother. The Americans are managing id-theft just fine, without his help. The article quotes a study by Gartner. An excerpt:

Gartner researcher Avivah Litan, who led the study, said the survey results also suggested that more than 1 million consumers have been tricked into divulging their personal information to senders of so-called phishing e-mails, with financial losses totaling nearly $1 billion.

And some more:

Using those surveyed as a sample, Litan estimated that 1.2 million Internet users believe they have divulged their personal information to criminals, who eventually managed to steal $929 million from those consumers' accounts in the past 12 months. And those figures are probably low, Litan said.

The size of the group that was surveyed was just 5,000 however and involves lots of extrapolation. So the whole thing may be wishful thinking.