A lot of posts here will no doubt be saying something along the lines "see, this is what happens when you outsource". Well, think about it from an investigator's point of view. If money was transferred illegitimately from a US customer to somewhere in the US, it would be much harder to figure out what was going on than if it was being sent to India. By outsourcing the call center to India, it has made the origin of this sort of fraud much easier to detect.
I'm a system administrator and most of my customers are in the UK. So when I'm investigating an incident on our servers, and the logs show some activity from Brazil, it makes my job a lot easier. What connection do local call centres have with a banks customers that people who live further don't? ...
it's cheaper than giving it to a `fellow American`. I should have thought that were obvious.
A Ha, and you've discovered my complaint. We get paid a lot more, we have less motivation to steal. We depend on that job, we have built a life around it. The paychecks are okay, so the risk to benefit ratio tells me not to steal from customers. On top of that, they are fellow countrymen.
However, in India it is a different story (don't flame, just an example).
The Indian worker is getting paid a fraction of what you've just spent. I sure hope there was no contempt in your voice - contempt breeds contempt. The tech looks at his check and sees a nice amount of money but he sees another option. Really, if he loses this job there will be another American company who will come around (best part is, they don't talk to each other). We've created the economic situation where it makes sense to work for a few weeks and rip a few hundred people off. An organized effort could be dangerous.
The Indian worker is getting paid a fraction of what you've just spent.
And here is the fallacy in your argument.
That indian tech may be getting a fraction of what YOU make per year. But, he is getting MANY TIMES as much as as the average Indian worker. Wealth is RELATIVE to your PEERS. Read any news story on outsourced workers and you see that they have some of the best living and working conditions in their country. Some even better than a lot of American workers.
And who says that Indian guy doesn't depend on his job? Why couldn't he have built a life around it? Just because they make fewer "American" dollars than you do, doesn't mean they're poor or any less deserving of what they have.
Everything is cheaper over there. The cost of living is way lower. This is why companies move their business there. They can pay him half what you make, and he still makes 3x as much as the next INDIAN worker.
Stop making the same WRONG argument that less american $$ = less skilled or less dedicated to one's job.
There was more contempt in your post than in its parent. You could do the SAME crime working as a first level hell-desk worker in the states. But I guess that would be okay because you "brought that work home."
And here is the fallacy in your argument.
That indian tech may be getting a fraction of what YOU make per year. But, he is getting MANY TIMES as much as as the average Indian worker.
And here's the fallacy in your argument - that same difference in pay scale/cost of living means that the $350K US that they made off with was worth a whole heck of a lot more to them than it would be to you.
Would I risk something like this for 10 years' salary? Nope.
Would I risk something like this for 50 years' salary? I'd like to think no, but I've never been tempted like this...
Would I risk something like this for for more money than I could otherwise reasonably expect to earn in my lifetime? Maybe. Imagine yourself in a situation where a few minutes effort would net you $10 million of someone else's money. Can you be sure that you wouldn't consider that at all tempting?
I'm not sure where these guys ended up on that scale, but I suspect that you're still talking about enough money to live comfortably for 20-30 years. The cynical part of me says that their real problem was that they didn't steal enough. If it had been a few hundred million, then they wouldn't be thieves, just international market speculators...
The problem with your argument is that companies do not move their businesses over there at all, they just hire employees at arms length and pay them at cut rate, but still keep their businesses in the US. The OWNERS and EXECUTIVES don't want to go to India, it sucks there, and can be dangerous. It's far away from their family, friends, banks, wall street, etc. To them India is a cheap people farm. They're not investing in India, they're not trying to build it up as an industrial or business superpower, they're just using it and if it gets expensive they'll find another impovrished country to bully. Meanwhile jobs are taken away from American workers in their own country. The same country whose taxes fund a legal system, military and police force which allows them to retain their money (be it real estate, investments or liquid cash). The same country were the average guy will have to go fight in a war to protect their business interests at pretty much their own whim. In some of the countries they are using for cheap labor, each executive, owner or investment company has enough in LIQUID cash to feed a city for years, don't tell me that their governments would try hard to find someone who in fact stole their money should it have been placed overseas. This person only got caught because he stole so little and stole from an American bank. If it was the First Bank of Nowhere India, who knows what would have happened. No I don't give a rats ass about the average Indian, but unless India wants to pledge itself as a commonwealth of the US I don't have to. They're on their own. In my opinion US companies should not be allowed to use their labor. Those companies need to stand on their own, and sell their services (properly tariffed) to US companies. The government could then control the cost of living in the US with respect to other places and reduce it slowly, which I think is probably necessary. Watching so much of this contries technical experience get outsourced only makes me wonder if we'll be able to do anything locally in the US in 20 years except make bad music and TV and change bedpans.
Main Entry: sarcasm
Pronunciation: 's?r-"ka-z&m
Function: noun
Etymology: French or Late Latin; French sarcasme, from Late Latin sarcasmos, from Greek sarkasmos, from sarkazein to tear flesh, bite the lips in rage, sneer, from sark-, sarx flesh; probably akin to Avestan thwar&s- to cut
1 : a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain
2 a : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual b : the use or language of sarcasm
synonym see WIT
All the crimes he mentioned were done by American citizens. Bombing federal buildings? McVeigh. Mailing bombs to universities? Kaczynski. Sniping people in Washington DC? Malvo. At least two of them thought they were fighting for their country, which they (somewhat correctly) saw as having been overrun by greedy corporate/big government idiots. I'm pretty sure Malvo was just getting a kick out of killing people.
In light of these examples, the "War on Terror" looks like a silly, yet all-too-serious, grab for power. In other words, I think you're preaching to the choir.
McVeigh WAS a hero/patriot in the old school sense.
Yes, because Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, et al set off carts full of blasting powder in front of crowded Offices of the Crown, randomly killing people, and this is how the US won the war of independence.
Not that killing children in daycare is a good thing. But why were people in a federal building hiding behind children anyway? They know wackos attack federal people from time to time
WTF are you talking about? Name one attack on a Federal building prior to (or after!) McVeigh. They weren't "hiding behind children" because they had no idea there was anyone to hide from.
Bet some government wonk was dumb enough to beleive that nobody would ever think of attacking them with children as a flesh shield.
Bet it never occured to anyone that some dumbass would think it worthwhile to set off a bomb in front of a building full of boring, miscellaneous government drones smack dab in the middle of Dullsville. Really, what kind of tard do you have to be to pick such a stupid target? If he wanted a symbolic hit against the FBI or BATF, he should have picked a FBI or BATF field office, instead of a building with mostly Social Security and postal service workers.
McVeigh did some fucked up shit, but I still cannot help but feel some respect for having the balls to do what he did.
I have trouble respecting mental midgets with delusions of grandeur simply because they fancy themselves super-patriots. A man walking down the street randomly cutting of people's heads while shouting "no taxation without representation" is no patriot in my book either. I might agree with the premise McVeigh started from, but I'd have to give him a big fat zero for his chosen conclusion. Fuck McVeigh. Fuck him twice. He was a typical macho failed-to-get-into-Ranger-school-so-he-left-the-Ar my dumbfuck that gave other Desert Storm vets like me a bad name for a long time.
If more Americans had the nuts to take their government to task for oppressive things they have done to this great country, things wouldn't be as shitty and corp-controlled as they are.
Yes, but blowing one another up is not going to get the feds off our back. I guarantee that no amount of purely symbolic random bombing is going result in anything more than further oppression.
But here I am posting anonymously because I am afraid of what the government might do to me for speaking outside of the "official truth".
Talk about delusions of grandeur. The government doesn't care about some guy on a message board spouting off about patriotism. Really, you sound like an actual tin-foil hatter who thinks the government is trying to read his thoughts. The flaw in that line of reasoning is the presumption that the feds even give a fuck about a a nobody like you (or me, for that matter). They don't care about people like us! Get over yourself!
The problem is jurisdiction. It's a lot simpler to investigate and prosecute crimes when they happen within a single country. Police detectives can obtain warrants and subpoenas from a local judge. They don't have to deal with the State Department, another country's foreign ministry, and prosecutors and police who have their own priorities and may not care if some local boys rip off some foreigners. Extradition, even when there are treaties in place, is relatively rare. It is usually reserved for the most serious crimes, like first-degree murder. Many countries will not extradite their own citizens, as a matter of policy.
True, since the crime had to have happened in India, it narrows the list of possible suspects down to only a billion people.
How is this easier? Money transferred from one bank account to another bank account is more easily traced within US. Our banks must follow strict guidelines, banks in other countries many nto have those same guidelines. If they transfered this money to say a Swiss bank account that didn't have any personal information attached to it - the police may never have caught a person. They might have been able to get to the account, and retrieve the money, butgettin a persons private info is much harder.
So when your logs show activity in Brazil, how is this easier then if your logs show activity in Maine?
We are sorry to inform you, but your account information has fallen into the hands of employees at an Indian Call center we do work with. Unfortunately, your account may be compromised.
It doesn't matter where people are located. What matters is that you have trustworthy people handling your business. And, you know what? Untrustworthy people are everywhere.
I, for one, do not buy into this Lou Dobbs racist/nationalist claptrap that says that we can't trust foreigners. I'm one of the biggest foreigners around, if you consider all the places I have to travel to that I'm not actually a citizen of.
Hey, bad people are in India. And in the U.S. And in Europe. And in Asia. Oh my god! They are everywhere!
Luckily, the bad people are outnumbered by the good. I can just take a look at my lists and figure that one out.
(Score:5, Insightful)
by on Friday April 08, @06:11AM ()
(Last Journal: )
It doesn't matter where people are located. What matters is that you have trustworthy people handling your business. And, you know what? Untrustworthy people are everywhere.If your employees are proud to be part of the firm, and if you treat them with respect and pay a decent wage, they are less likely to turn to fraud. However, if you treat them like shit and pay peanuts, they are more likely to become disgruntled and commit fraud or (digital) vandalism. Yes, just like in 'Office space'.
The current relentless drive to reduce employee costs to a minimum does not help in that respect, in any country. From what I understand, Indians are currently happy with their current wages (and often very odd working hours). But what will happen when the squeeze from even cheaper Chinese workers is on
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On the other hand, you don't have to be poor to be so consumed by greed that you're willing to steal or commit fraud to further line your pockets. Just look at Enron, Worldcom, etc if you want proof of that.Too true. There are two problems to consider. Rampant poverty will increase crime. Especially in the event where labor is being done, but the laborers are not reaping the rewards of their labor. So that's one contributing factor, in the U.S. as well as abroad.
A second contributing factor is the culture of greed that dominates in the modern world. Wealth without labor is the new goal. One of the most elequent discussions of this I have seen was by harvey pekar, in an issue of American Splendor (sorry, don't remember what issue). But we have a culture (which we are aggresively exporting) which places more importance on the possession of wealth than on honesty, integrity, or a strong work ethic.
I'm hoping that this is actually changing, that the Bernard Ebbers, the Dick Cheneys, the Kenneth Lays and Darrel McBride's become outcasts and pariahs, shunned and hated enough by society at large that people feel a strong enough social pressure to mitigate their greediest instincts.
Whatever you tink about Lou Dobbs, it's very irresponsible to just dismiss him as a racist.
Even "nationalist" is nonsense, he's merely pointing out one of the problems with unresitriced and unbalanced "unfair" trade. Now, you could argue this is a good thing, and we could point out the problems and have a discussion. But by labeling him a racist, the only thing you're trying to do is to "shut down" any arguments by coming up with ridiculous ad hominem attacks.
I'm an immigrant to this country, and I'm not a fan of outsourcing. I'm all for other immigrants from all over the world to continue coming here and contributing their talents to our local economies, but there is a problem when now people don't even want to become US residents, because they jobs are being drained away from here. We're about to face a serious crisis, when our technological workforce is being decimated by these companies. And there's nothing racist in pointing that out, nothing.
As for security, I don't think most if any people here are saying that a particular nationality is less trustworthy. But you'd be a fool if you don't recognize that some of the safety mechanism we enjoy in this country, are not as robust or even exist in other parts of the less developed world. As we deal with the poorest of nations, with our sensitive data, we have to be *extremely* careful. Already, there have been incidents of bribing by local crime syndicates in some of these countries to obtain data to steal identities. Can that happen in the US? Of course! But the question is, where is it more likely, and what are the protections we need to employ in these situations.
There's a rich discussion to be had on this topic, but please, try to come up with something better than "they're racist".
I wonder if this can be called hacking, looks more like a combination of poor process and security management on the part of Citi (if it is indeed Citi). Companies in the US should be wary of the extent of employee churn that happens in BPO firms in India. I'm in India, and I often get to hear of ex-employees stealing databases when they leave...
So they should start aborting outsourcing attempts because the US doesn't have data privacy laws?
Rather than phoning up your banks and finding out where your information is ending up, which can be a tedious process, shouldn't you be phoning up your congress representatives and asking them to enact laws which provide for your privacy?
I only hope this news flashes through the industry and gets in the heads of CEOs and PHBs everywhere who then start aborting outsourcing attempts.
I'm not sure Indians are any more likely to jot down card numbers that thier minimum-wage US counterparts. Except, of course, that an Indian phone jockey makes a better wage (by local standards), arguably giving them less reason to committ such fraud.
It's annoying when you can't understand what someone says on the phone, sure, but I don't think they're any more likely to be criminals than thier western counterparts.
(Score:5, Insightful)
by on Friday April 08, @06:00AM ()
(Last Journal: )
When I take credit card info over the phone I could do just the same.
The only slight difference is that it's worth more over there.
So I find it odd that this is considered different.
It's just a different way of grouping of decimal places. In India it's common to have them group two decimal places instead of three. Get a better description here: [answers.com] Globalisation is however making indians, albeit reluctantly, shift to the million/billion system, but it'll take time...
Citicards, the Credit card division of Citibank, got a new CIO several months ago. Mitchell Habib. He came from GE Medical. Before leaving there, he outsourced about 75% of their IT staff to India. He's currently doing the same at Citi. I worked there as a contractor. Two other contractors on the team and I were unable to get our contracts renewed because it came down from on high that all new contracts had to go thru TCS, Tata Consulting Services. They are the Indian outsourcing company that he used in the past. I recently went back to visit some friends and met my replacement. A nice young Indian guy making a third to a quarter of what I made there.
From what I understand, the standard rate for calculating your budget for contract work went from $70/hr to $22/hr. Of course, I believe they charge around $40/hr for their workers in the states.
Thats exactly the problem though. If you are willing to work for $22/hr. You need to get a job with TCS first, and then get sent to Citi. Now it's a lot like going to work a staffing firm based in the US, who has a contract with another company in the US...
How easy is it for you to get a job with TCS if you are already based in America ? Not very easy. Plus if a company like USAA and Citibank have given exclusive contracts to TCS, then it makes it extremely hard for local recruiting agencies and talent to get the job. How come every company that has a contract with TCS ends up having 20-30 new indian contractors ? Something needs to be done about these exclusive contracts, and TCS needs to be told to first look for local talent. I know lots of people who have lowered their rates, just to compete with the Indians, but these exclusive contracts to companies who naturally are averted to experienced local candidates (can't exploit them as well), needs to be changed.
PS: I am an indian immigrant myself, I moved here when I was 13. And, I am competing for my job with classmates I had in India. I'm not racist or a bigot. I haven't lost my job to an outsourcing firm etc, but thats because I rarely work for large firms that can afford outsourcing in the first place.
The alleged perpetrators used the personal information of four NY-based clients to transfer ~$350,000 (Rs. 1.5 crores) in their names, a large sum in Indian currency.
I once called a creditor of mine and was obviously routed to an overseas call center. The gentleman on the other end of the phone after asking me my issue asked me my social security number. I was hesitant to give it away to a guy in india making $.50 an hour but figured I was being paranoid. I gave him the number and he said please hold. The next thing I knew he put me on hold and I was transferred to another service representative (in the us) who also asked for my social security number. Well needless to say I let them have it basically "Why would they ask me for my social security number to transfer me?" I started checking my credit report and stopped doing business with the bank. Nothing came of it and I was being paranoid but the reality is this sort of thing can happen anywhere. At a restaurant you give the server your card. Most servers make low wages and they take your card off to the back room usually.
I really should update my account details in Citibank, as per the email that I got awhile ago.
They said my monies will be stoeled if I don't
"This brings into issue all the medical, supposidly confidental, data that gets sent to India for transscribing. I hope companies from around the world take a look at the amount of personal information they are sending to around the world with out thought of who might be watching it.
Corporations as a whole do not care at all about the personal data that they send anywhere; the data is simply a commodity. To companies that are used to dealing with large amounts of commodities (including personal information), the loss or compromise of a certain percentage of the commodity is tolerated and expected. For corporations it is cheaper to pay for the loss than it is to prevent the loss.
Although this particular sort of naive fraud is unlikely to repeated for a while at Citibank, Citibank has a history of association with much more sophisticated and serious fraudulent activity. I refer to Citibank's crucial role in suggesting, creating, structuring, and maintaining the complex banking and hedging schemes for both Enron and WorldCom. Forget the Enron and WorldCom directors for a moment. The Citibank directors who were involved should be held accountable for their contribution to the frauds and yet they have all somehow managed to evade proper censure; indeed they still hold company office - that's absolutely not right. The SEC and AG have done nothing with any of them. Let's avoid using Citibank and let's see why they they get away with their activities...
$350,000 is a menial sum compared to some of the huge fraud that happens in the Western World (just look at Worldcom as an example).
However, outsourcing to people in less developed parts of the world means that much smaller (and presumably more "readily available") sums of money can provide them with a very good living still & make committing fraud worthwhile in the firstplace.
There are no intended racial overtones in these comments, just observations, and quite frankly it's the mega-corporations I laugh at now that they will start to get their "just desserts" for messing up the economies and lives of so many people for the sake of a few bucks.
Let's face it, if you're a Citibank (if that's who it is) customer that got ripped off by this, you'll get your money back anyway because it's obviously a security issue with the bank themselves, not the customer's fault.
I say good luck to the Indian call centre workers - they're being used as the 21st century equivalent of sweatshop labourers anyway so they should grab what they can before they demand too high wages and they themselves get dumped by the corporations like a lot of the rest of us have.
I think most people here are really missing the point of this story. Up until now, the only jobs that were being outsourced to India were call centers, software engineers and a few other white collar jobs.
With this event, something much more serious has taken place. We have begun to outsource criminal activity. Oh the horror. What about the children of the criminals in the US? Where will they get their crack money?
This is very serious. We need to act now to prevent tossing away the lives of those in the US who have worked sometimes for their entire lives committing crime. While it might be possible for an engineer or call center employee to be retrained for a new job, we have lots of experience that says we are not very good at retraining out crimininals. After all, there are only so many CEO positions available in the US.
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