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By Elinor Mills, 1 April 2009 13:03

NEWS

Symantec said on Tuesday that it is looking into allegations that a call centre in India leaked credit card numbers of its customers to someone who then sold them to BBC News reporters in an undercover investigation.

The company has informed UK privacy authorities and attorneys general and officials in eight US states and Puerto Rico of the allegations that three UK customers had credit card information leaked and that about 200 US customers may have been affected because of interactions with the call centre, according to a Symantec spokesman.

"We nailed it down to one agent at the call centre" who handled the Symantec customers, he said. That agent was put on administrative leave pending the investigation, he added.

In addition to Puerto Rico, the states contacted were: New Hampshire, Maryland, New Jersey, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, the spokesman said.

It was unclear how the data of the three UK customers got from the call centre and into the hands of the man who the BBC News said sold the credit card numbers. Nor was it clear whether any data from the US customers had been leaked. Symantec said there is no evidence that any US data was exposed.

In a letter to New Hampshire Attorney General Kelly Ayotte dated 24 March, the security vendor said it was "investigating a potential security incident involving a small number of customers' credit card information".

The letter said Symantec was sending a notice to an unnamed customer in New Hampshire who may have been affected by the alleged incident, even though the company does not believe a security breach as defined by New Hampshire statue had occurred.

The company said even though it has no evidence that credit card information of any US residents was actually compromised, it was offering its customers one year of identity protection services through Debix as a precautionary measure, and reviewing its "security processes and third-party vendor protocols".

The BBC News reported on 19 March that undercover reporters posing as fraudsters had gone to Delhi to buy 50 credit card numbers, at $10 a card, from a man who claimed to have gotten them from a call centre. They filmed the interaction. The man denied any wrongdoing, the BBC said.

When the reporters contacted some of the card owners, three of them said they had bought Norton software from Symantec over the phone using their cards and the purchases were found to have been made within hours of each other and the numbers were sent to the BBC shortly thereafter, the report said.

Symantec has set up an e-mail address for customers to contact to get more information at global_purchase_query@symantec.com. The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the Symantec letters to officials on Tuesday.