Companies love outsourcing. It saves them huge amounts of money over hiring Americans, not only with salaries (why pay an American $9/hour to do a job you can pay an Indian $9/day to do?), but also with benefits, payroll taxes, property taxes, and a million other things.
Consumers, on the other hand, hate it. The hate is partly due to the language barrier that often comes with outsourcing. But it’s also due to some of the things the foreign companies do themselves, such as order their call takers to adopt an American name and persona when talking to customers. When a guy that sounds like Apu from The Simpsons tries to tell you that his name is Bob and he’s from Kansas City, Oregon… well, it’s just insulting.
And now it seems like you can add identity theft to the list of concerns over outsourcing. Actually, identity theft via outsourcing is nothing new… but this story from The Consumerist should give you pause. The Consumerist article, written by one of the call takers at a Chase call center in the US, is a giant bucket of fail.
It seems that Chase has a call center and a “security team” in the the United States, but their off-hours security is outsourced to a call center in the Philippines. The US call center people noticed a male with a distinctive voice calling them frequently, apparently probing for any information he could get about a few accounts. The call takers passed the information on to the US branch of Chase’s security team, who quickly put a block on the account.