Companies are facing backlash from fired employees who took sensitive data with them when they left.
A massive struggle in India is making insurance news, as Indian insurers discover that employees whom they fired are using sensitive information that they brought with them in order to create a kind of guerilla backlash.
A number of insurers have now alerted the country’s regulator to inform it of this situation.
What this insurance news has revealed is that fired workers walked away with the data associated with thousands of policies, and that customer information is now being misused in order to attempt to “blackmail” the companies. The information being used is that which was provided by the consumers at the time that they purchased their policies.
This guerilla backlash appears to be growing as the insurance news is occurring among a larger number of insurers.
Within the past month, this insurance news has become especially prevalent as many different insurers – primarily in the life sector – have been swamped with letters from their consumers alleging mis-selling and old policy issues and that threaten to take their business elsewhere.
The letters, which were notably well written and that were most frequently from the higher value clients, began raising suspicions that the policyholders in question had been contacted by individuals who had access to certain forms of sensitive information.
Aside from the disgruntled former employees, some of the insurance news also involved the actions of a broker based in the north of India and who does business with several different insurers. The suspicion is that he may be involved in this scam due to his specific and expensive connections.
The strategy at the heart of this insurance news was that fired employees were using the customer data that they brought with them when they left the company in order to contact those customers. They told the customers that they had not received the best possible deal. The intention was to create a threat to the insurers and force them to head to the negotiating tables. Then, the customer would pay a form of commission to the fired employee for the “services” provided in order to achieve a better deal from the insurer.
