Millions of credit card customers are having their details put at risk by UK call centres, 97 per cent of which are consistently flouting rules on data security, according to research published today.

A national poll of UK call centre managers by Veritape, the audio recording specialists, found that recordings of calls where customers reveal sensitive financial details, including their 3-digit security code, are routinely stored on call centre computer servers, leaving them vulnerable to hackers.

This is in direct breach of global industry standards drawn up by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Council.

The findings are published in a paper, The Great Credit Card Gamble, released to coincide with National Fraud Prevention Week. The report states that nineteen out of twenty call centres that store recordings of transactional conversations with customers do not delete or mask the credit card details in the recordings.

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