US credit card customers under Indian scanner

Recession-spooked US credit card companies are playing hardball to ensure that customers do not default. Even customers who have made all their payments on time are coming in for extra scrutiny. Analysts in Indian back offices are riffling through tax returns filed by US customers for the past three years to weigh in on their creditworthiness. Of course, this hasn’t gone down too well with US customers.

Cathy Jones, a businesswoman with three American Express (Amex) charge cards, got a call from Amex last week saying her cards were on hold while the company carried out a financial investigation to make sure she could pay her bills.

Jones, an Amex cardholder since 1989, told MSNBC network that she baulked when an Amex representative in New Delhi asked her to fill out IRS form 4506-T, authorising the company to get her tax returns for the past three years.

“Jones did not want someone overseas having access to her IRS tax returns, which contain a lot of confidential information, including her social security number,” said the US network.

Meanwhile, American Express in New York declined to confirm or deny whether the financial investigations on thousands of US-based Amex charge card customers are being carried out in India. “I think people are just nervous because of scams,” office manager Andrew Robertson told DNA.

India, which is a back office to 815 US banks and financial service firms, has been hit by a string of data-theft cases. There was a furore when The Sun newspaper in the UK ran a sting operation showing it paid some $5 each for details on 1,000 British customers’ bank accounts, credit cards, passports, and drivers’ licences, including numbers and pass codes. Police in India recently busted a group of call-centre workers operating out of Pune who stole money from the accounts of US Citibank customers.