Citibank's Consumer Ed Effort
We get asked a lot here at WebWatch to help consumers avoid phishing and spoofing. While doing some research I happened to look at Citibank's site for its new high-interest Internet savings account. You should go there and scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the link that says "e-mail fraud & security." (You may have to turn off your pop-up blocker). Bravo Citibank! (Full disclosure: My wife has a Citibank credit card, but those of you who know my attitude towards credit cards would correctly guess that's not going to make me cut Citibank slack). Of course, Citibank has had some high-profile problems with security, which Adweek made fun of. And it looks like some former Citibank call center employees in Pune, India (where Bhagwan Sree Rajneesh, long-dead and rebranded Osho, wound up after getting kicked out of Oregon) got a little entrepreneurial recently.
Amusing along those lines is this about a similar incident in Calcutta (which doesn't name the U.S. bank involved). Talk about a security hole: "Singh explained that there wasn't anything particularly complicated or high-tech about the fraud: When the American clients would contact the call center for online purchases she'd simply jot the numbers down. Evidently clients in California started complaining about unauthorized purchases, and Indian police tracked the fraud back to the Kolkata center..." Of course, these things could happen at any call center in any country. It's called the human factor, folks, and it's the eternal security risk.