India Call Centre Staff Bribed

Evening Standard ^ | 2/10/04 | Pete Warren

[Samizdat]

'India call centre staff bribed' Pete Warren, Evening Standard 10 February 2004

STAFF at call centres in India are being bribed by organised crime and industrial spies to them help hack into the computer systems of British firms.

In at least two recent cases, local IT staff working on the sub-continent for UK institutions were involved in what industry sources say were 'security issues' in what is described as the tiniest fraction of a far larger problem.

In one case, sensitive financial information and credit card details were apparently illegally taken from a leading British financial institution.

A spokesman for the National Outsourcing Association (NOA) in Britain said: 'This shows that there are some things that you really should not send overseas. For organised criminals, this is a godsend.

'If you are using people in a low wage area, organised crime can afford to pay a lifetime's wages for data.'

Richard Hollis, managing director of Orthus, an information security solutions company in London, claims the problem is growing because Indian staff have access to increasingly sensitive customer information.

He said: 'We're seeing a significant increase in security problems associated with this type of outsourcing. Given that the majority of hacking originates from within organisations, outsourcing administrative responsibilities to an engineer making around £4,000 annually is asking for problems.

'The engineers employed by these firms are extremely skilled technicians and since they already possess the passwords and unrestricted access to the networks they service, they have quickly become targets for organised crime and private investigative firms looking to buy their way into a network.'

The revelations came after Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt chaired a meeting last Monday to discuss the growing trend for call centres and other outsourced tasks to be switched from Britain to India.

Several British firms including Aviva, BT, ebookers, HSBC and Tesco have unveiled plans to relocate, or already created call centres in India.

Academics and industry experts believe this exodus could represent just the tip of the iceberg as other service industries look set to follow.

Manchester Business School's Professor Peter Barrah, author of the International Handbook on Outsourcing, said: 'It's a trend that is limited only by your imagination. There are some services that have to be delivered here and now; for anything that is produced with, or uses, a computer there is the potential for offshore outsourcing.

'There are companies that have now outsourced their strategy, the development of their marketing campaigns and their new product development.'

The DTI is currently commissioning research that it hopes will give a clearer picture of the true trend of job migration.

In the UK, there are about 400,000 people involved in the call-centre industry in about 5,500 call centres.

[SauronOfMordor]

I wonder how much it costs to have an Indian or Chicom programmer put back door but into accounting code? Or a back door into network code, or a backdoor into defense code

The plotline of one of Tom Clancy's books (I think "Debt of Honor") starts out with some overseas Bad Guys getting a logic bomb stuck into the computers that track trades at the NY Stock Exchange, then causing a stock collapse by taking advantage of inside knowledge of the behavior of program trading software at big institutionals. The market crashes, and then the trade history is corrupted so nobody has any record of what trades occured, throwing the US financial industry into chaos

The purpose is to keep the US administration too busy dealing with that, to be able to interfere with a foreign power's invasion of some valuable islands in the Pacific.

Sound implausible? I don't think so. And I worked in a major regional stock exchange with lots of foreign nationals (India, China, and Russia) doing software development and having access to operational data

[Southack]

"So, seriously, How did the Indians "get their hooks" into you???"

Oh, you know how fads go. You try the big name established shops because that's who your big clients are already using. Then you get smart and put your turnkey project components up for open bids on-line (getting offers from all parts of the world, especially the U.S.).

For us, the motivation to use Indian labor started out back in 1999 when we were left with only a few large, labor-intensive Y2K conversion projects for some low priority legacy systems. The job market here was tight at that time, and none of our guys wanted to go blind looking at ancient 2 digit code that now needed 4 digit math.

The pitch that we got was that Indian programmers were starving and were willing to work themselves to the bone on even these sorts of eye-killing, mundane software conversions. So we gave them a try. The initial results were completely awful. Some of the projects wouldn't even compile as is when they were delivered back to us, though it took only a few tweaks on our side to fix those problems (indicating that our Indian shop had done the work without a compiler...i.e. entirely by hand and in their heads as if on a word processor). Other Y2K projects came back incomplete or didn't come back at all.

It wasn't pretty. It did, however, open our eyes to how much "hype" was going on about saving money by offshoring...and that made us much more savvy with what we offloaded in the future. Putting the same turn-key projects up for bid on-line, for instance, let shops around the world bid for the work...and the on-line bidding process has an eBay-style feedback mechanism that lets you rate your work as well as view how well (or not) your low-cost prospective bidder has performed for others in the past.

Even so, such outsourcing is only a *tiny* part of our business. It makes financial sense in a few cases, but you simply can't bet your firm on the sort of capricious quality and dubious time-deliveries associated with outsourcing, at least when dealing with the vast majority of what our customers want and expect. Security is also an issue. Some of our code for some of our clients simply has to stay locked inside our shop domestically.

The whole concept of outsourcing the even more sensitive *data* boggles my mind. The CEO's who are doing it are risking getting burned in a very big way.

[WayneM]

As an IT professional, I must admit that this is some of the best news I've seen in months. Now all that needs to happen is for our legal system (damaged customers and their bulldog lawyers) to hold accountable those who allowed this to happen. A few hundred thousand lawsuits should do the trick. Another example of a) getting what you pay for, and b) the bottom line not really being the bottom line.

Payback is wonderful.

[SwordofTruth]

One thing that outsourcing does not encourage is employee loyalty.

You got that right. These Indian employees aren't stupid; they know that very qualified Americans got laid off so they could do the work they used to do. They realize the same thing could happen to them in a few years due to even lower salaries in China. They might as well take a bribe and ensure their future prosperity while they can.

[freeangel]

Just doing the jobs Americans don't want will be the administrations reply.

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

I have been saying this since they started out sourcing computer data and programming.

Ditto. I've said it before and I'll say it again:

Any bank that can guarantee that they will NOT offshore their customer accounts to foreign access will soon have more business than it can handle. Americans will soon be paying more for what they once had for less - security.

All of our medical, telecommunication, financial, etc. records were once under a physical lock and key.

Now, in foreign lands, w/o our laws, w/o our law enforcement, our very most important personal records are very vulnerable.

Recently a Pakistani held the medical records of 4 Americans 'hostage', with threats of publishing the details on the internet. The story was in a San Francisco newspaper, because the outsourcing agency that hired out the work to Pakistan was in the Bay area.

[HiTech RedNeck]

The bank is "re-evaluating" its use of Indian ousourcing.

Papa may wish to "re-evaluate" who his bank is

[HiTech RedNeck]

In fact I'm rather stunned that the financial press hasn't siezed upon this development yet. It's certainly going to impact stock prices.

Surely it's because of the profits they get from outsourcing. Letting a story like this break would kill that golden goose as John Q. Public gets a healthy case of outsourceaphobia.

[Southack]

"Surely it's because of the profits they get from outsourcing."

The profits aren't even that great, actually. A well run outsourcing effort can squeeze out 20% cost savings for comparable quality and timelines...but even those profits are elusive if the Dollar fluctuates in value too much.

Of course, the myth that was created by the outsourcing hype would have you believe that Indian software is just about free, almost pure profit, and better quality than anything that we have here.

But if that was actually the case then we would have been seeing all new operating systems developed domestically by Indian firms and exported here, rather than seeing Linux getting developed in the U.S., EU, and Mexico...much less Windows getting developed in Seattle.

So the hype and myth is a bit different from the reality on the ground (to say the least).

[Brellium]

Surprise, surprise. One thing that outsourcing does not encourage is employee loyalty.

The same could be said stateside, it used to be we worked with the Christian employee system, "Work hard for your employeer, and you shall be rewarded in retirement." Now we're moving close to the Hindu system "Take what you have learned in your current job and apply it to your next." Yet the stories never end about management complaining of poor morale.

Things continue the way the do, major corporations deserve everything that comes to them.

[Euro-American Scum]

'If you are using people in a low wage area, organised crime can afford to pay a lifetime's wages for data.'

Words to remember when your identity gets stolen out of Bangalore.

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

the Christian employee system, "Work hard for your employeer, and you shall be rewarded in retirement." Now we're moving close to the Hindu system "Take what you have learned in your current job and apply it to your next."

Our CEOs fail to realize that our nation, with its wonderfully fertile culture for creating, developing and growing a business, is what allowed them to become CEOs.

Transplanting their businesses into foreign soil, will not, and cannot, bring about the same results.

[philosofy123]

Good idea. All the CEOs are good for is to hustle vacation packages, or time share!

[mommybain]

Dell Computers

The last I heard, Dell was bringing it's business customer service work back to the U.S, but not it's personal customer service. Hopefully they'll bring it all back.

I'm a systems analyst who is surrounded by Covansys contractors in North Carolina. When I'm on call I have to consult with people in India that I helped train. Any work I do on our systems has to be approved by Convansys contractors that I helped train. Anybody out there looking to get into the IT business, think again. At least until this offshore crap stops (IF it stops.)

[Southack]

I had made reference to a 66% employee turnover rate in India, either on this thread or another. Here is Time Magazine documenting a claimed 60% annual attrition rate there...

http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:30rULQkaMigJ:www.time.com/time/covers/1101040301/bindia.html+India+employee+turnover+rate&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

 

 

NAMAS BHOJANI FOR TIME

NIGHT SHIFT: Depression is on the rise in call centers like this one in Bangalore

Meanwhile, In India
	Prosperity and its perils in the outsourcing hotspot
	By SARA RAJAN

Posted Sunday, Feb. 22, 2004
Steel-and-glass office buildings and sprawling corporate campuses are taking shape to handle the flood of new businesses and employees. Major players like IBM, Oracle and Intel are here, as are promising start-ups. At Sony World and Bose, techies are landing lucrative service gigs. It may sound like yesterday's Silicon Valley, but it's very much the present—in the high-tech mecca of Bangalore.

Booming Bangalore represents the Indian economy in fast-forward, one that is growing at more than 8% annually, double the rate of the U.S.'s. Of course, India is still poor by comparison—average annual per capita income is a mere $480 nationally. But the outsourcing wave from the U.S. has provided an outlet for the thousands of technically astute, English-speaking graduates pouring out of India's élite universities. These kids are earning—and spending—as never before.

But an economic party like this one has its hangovers, such as BOSS, or burnout stress syndrome, another Valley-like feature now found in Bangalore. When Ranit Bhalla, 25, a software engineer, joined tech giant Wipro four years ago, the work was so intense he often found himself sleeping and even bathing at the office. "For most of us who pushed hard to get ahead, we lived, ate and breathed our jobs," he says. After six months of 16-hour workdays, 3 a.m. dinners and gastric problems, his exhausted body finally gave out. He spent 15 days in a hospital and then needed counseling. Three out of 14 of the workers in his unit similarly burned out. Doctors cite high levels of substance addiction and relationship breakdowns among IT workers. "If you look at the stress levels in that environment and the hours they keep, you begin to see why these things happen," says Dr. Achal Bhagat, a psychiatrist at New Delhi's Apollo Hospital.

It's no easier on workers at the call centers that handle U.S. customer-service complaints. In a recent survey by India's Dataquest magazine, 40% said they suffered from sleep disorders, and 34% complained of digestive problems. "It's a tough life," says Shruti Kaushik, 21, an IBM call-center employee. Kaushik took the job seven months ago "to make some easy money," about $160 a month. But the credit-collection work isn't easy. "Things get monotonous; there are rude customers," she says. Combine those factors with the 10- to 12-hour night shifts that Indian IT workers pull so they can stay in synch with U.S. daytime hours—India is 10 1/2 hours ahead of Eastern time—and "it reduces life to a vacuum," says Bhagat. "Where's the time to lead a normal existence?"

To help alleviate stress, Wipro and other IT firms have hired dietitians and yoga and meditation teachers. But the outsourcing industry has a 60% rate of employee turnover per year. "I work hard, but this is no life," says Kaushik. Her solution: "I'm going to quit soon." It's a luxury most Indians would never have dreamed of.

[gitmo]

Excellent.