Well, for all those who have a problem about Indians speaking in English, there is news that a group of such people sweet talked American customers into letting out what should be a well-kept secret — codes and passwords for their credit cards and bank accounts. The executives then opened fictitious accounts where money to the tune of half a million dollars were transferred. The plan was executed by former employees and a woman worker of MphasiS, a leading business and process outsourcing (BPO) provider with help from former bank employees in the USA. The money was transferred into fake accounts from cyber cafes in Pune (a BPO hub in Maharashtra), before the police, on complaint by Citibank account holders in USA that was forwarded to Mphasis, swooped in.

The technique used by the call center executives is referred to as "social engineering," which is the proper name for plain sweet talk wherein the customer is befriended and critical information unsuspectingly garnered. The other method is called "phishing" which is the digital route wherein bogus e-mails are sent to an account holder asking him to fill in details about his account and passwords for verification. People have become more wary about the digital format due to frauds in the past.

MphasiS vice-chairman Jeroen Tas in a statement said: "There is no evidence of a breach or audit failure in the processes or systems employed by MphasiS and its client as it appears to be a case of password/PIN sharing and compromise. However, in the light of this incident, we are conducting full external audits on processes and compliance."

Interestingly, the heist was not committed by nerds out on an ego trip to achieve a technological permutation considered impossible to achieve, the way it is with virus writers. There was no infringing of firewalls or decoding encrypted software, but identifying the right personnel to execute the job smoothly and share the booty after the passwords were accessed. The said crime was perpetrated by young people, both Indian and American (former bank employees), some with MBA degrees, who coaxed sensitive information out of unsuspecting clients.

The five who have been caught are under 30, with three of them below 25, from middle-class families with no criminal backgrounds. These youngsters, who form the core of the young Indian BPO industry, are given to flashy lifestyles and are at the vanguard of the consumerist culture pervading urban India. Recently two young BPO workers committed suicide (one shooting himself and a girl on a drug overdose) in New Delhi, the reason ostensibly being the inability to cope up with stress of work and matching lifestyles.

Indeed, the MphasiS-heist is the kind of attention that India’s BPO could have done without, given the antipathy that exists in the West against India’s back-end office operations. The last thing that India would want is that the fraud should be used as a further beating stick. Apart from the shock of such a clever happening, there is a deep introspection in the industry to plug such future loopholes.

Financial frauds happen across the world to the tune of billions of dollars every year, so it would be unfair to pin down the Indian BPO industry only. Earlier this month hackers stole details of 1.4 million credit cards of a large retail chain in USA. The police in New Delhi recently arrested two people in possession of details of thousands of credit cards. But, this is the first instance of such fraud in the still incipient Indian call center and outsourcing industry. There have been reports of drugs being outsourced to India. That was taking advantage of a loophole with price arbitrage resulting in the illegal trade. The MphasiS crime is not about a distorted system but about making a fool of somebody and has been labeled by the Indian media as the country’s "first outsourcing cyber-fraud."

While the overwhelming opinion is that financial frauds are common place around the world, India as a new entrant in the global marketplace needs to be extra cautious, with a strict deterrent mechanism in place. In times of excessive competition, image counts for a lot apart from protecting consumer/customer interests.

"Credit card fraud is a worldwide phenomenon but because it happened in India, which has emerged as the most preferred BPO destination, this incident was a bit over-hyped," an MphasiS spokesperson has said.

A prominent voice from the Indian BPO industry is quoted as saying: "We need to create a robust framework of processes which ensures that minimal needed information access is given to the minimum number of people; that they are monitored and trained to respond to threats on a regular basis. A common database of BPO employees who breach procedures is conceptually good but implementation will be a problem."

There is a lot at stake. A recent McKinsey report on the Information Technology enabled sector has revised the previous figure of $ 17 billion to $ 21-24 billion by the year 2008 with India slated to garner 25 % of the off-shore market, with the US, the largest source, providing 60 % of business. Estimates suggest that 200,000 to 400,000 jobs have moved from the US since the outsourcing trend began in the 1990s, which is still a fraction of 138 million jobs in the US. The most high-end projection is by Forrester Research — a loss of 3.3 million jobs by 2015, including 1.7 million back-office jobs and 473,000 IT jobs — which will create a dent in the US job market and not the wreck everyone fears.