Indian Police Arrest Employee at HSBC Outsourcing Center for Cheating U

by The buttociated Press

6-28-2006 NEW DELHI (AP) -- Police in Bangalore, India's technology hub, have arrested an employee at a data processing center for allegedly siphoning $420,000 from the accounts of 20 customers of United Kingdom-based bank HSBC, news reports said Wednesday.

The arrest was made after HSBC Electronic Data Processing India Ltd. -- which handles the bank's back-office work from outsourcing centers in India -- filed a complaint saying one of its employees accessed ãpersonal, security and debit card informationä and pbutted them on to buttociates involved in the fraud.

This is the second major bank fraud reported by an outsourcing center in India in less than a year.

Last August, police in Pune arrested three former employees of Mphasis Ltd. -- which is now owned by U.S.-based Electronic Data Systems Corp. -- for allegedly cheating four Citibank customers out of nearly $350,000.

The HSBC incident was brought to light by customers in Britain who complained that money had been transferred from their accounts between March and May without their knowledge, the Financial Express newspaper reported.

The report quoted Puneet Dar, a senior official at HSBC's outsourcing center, as saying the bank's internal security team discovered that one of the staff leaked customer data, which led to the fraud.

A report in The Hindu Business Line newspaper said the arrested employee had joined HSBC giving false information about his education and work experience.

No other details were available. The reports could not be independently verified.