Mumbai, June 27: The BPO hall of infamy has just added one more name: Nadeem Kashmiri.
Kashmiri, 24, a Bangalore-based BPO worker, stands accused of masterminding one of the biggest call centre frauds in India by leaking credit card information relating to global clients of Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) to a gang of scamsters who ripped off close to Rs 1.8 crore from those accounts.
Kashmiri was arrested tonight after the bank filed a complaint against him with Bangalore police, adds PTI.
Kashmiri joins Karan Bahree and Ivan Samuel Thomas on the rogue list of BPO employees. Bahree, a former employee of Gurgaon-based Infinity e-search, was trapped in a sting operation run by London tabloid Sun where an undercover reporter persuaded him to part with information relating to 1,000 accounts of a British bank for a paltry ?2,750.
Thomas was the ringleader behind the so-called Mphasis-Citibank scam that broke out in Pune in March 2005 with 16 former employees of the BPO closing down bank accounts and transferring cash worth Rs 1.83 crore into their own accounts.
Neither Bahree nor Thomas were ever tried in court and there is a good chance that Kashmiri will also disappear into a footnote of BPO history since Indian laws against cyber crimes are never rigorously enforced.
Police said Kashmiri had passed on information to his associates in the UK that could have enabled the crooks to siphon off ?333,000. However, 20 customers of HSBC alerted the bank to the fraud and helped it restrict the loss to just ?233,000.
“We have complained to the Bangalore police. They are carrying out investigations,” an HSBC spokesperson said and refused to say anything more.
Kashmiri had joined the electronic data processing unit of HSBC in Bangalore in December 2005 using false records. The bank has said Nadeem joined HSBC “with the intention to deceive and cheat the bank and its customers. He accessed customers’ accounts unauthorised from the day he was deputed to the processing floor on February 6.”
Police are believed to have registered a case against Kashmiri under Sections 66 and 72 of the Information Technology Act, which contains provisions against hacking and breach of privacy, as well as Sections 408, 468 and 420 of the Indian Penal Code.