VoIP Enables Call Center Crime?

VoIP News talks about some of the call center crime that is going on in India. The truth is that business VoIP features allows for call centers to be set up with at relatively little cost, but security is an issue. So how does a client in, say, North America, make a call center responsible? How do they ensure that their own clients are not being ripped off? Short of insisting on some sort of all-around monitoring, it’s not easy. However, that does not preclude a call center in North America of doing the same thing. Look what’s happening with all the stolen laptops of government officers/ staff. That’s just as bad, if not worse.

From a customer point of view, I’d say you should refuse to do business with any financial institution that does not give you clear, up-front guarantees about the safety of your personal information. It’s one thing to have an outsourced call center for tech support on products such as consumer electronics, etc., and quite another for banking and credit. I make it a habit to politely ask where the person is that I’m talking to. Most will answer me, I find, even though some of them in India and elsewhere are told not to. But I can detect accents and the occasional slip of colloquial conversation.

I have no easy answers, but one idea is to have credit card numbers that cannot be used without a special passcode, which would not be recorded in the call center’s system – only in the financial institution’s database. Short of that, basically we need a new breed of geek mind to fight geek crime.