Bout Dat Xperience

Data belonging to 500,000 Britons on offer to criminals and marketing firms Crooks offering information on customers of major High Street banks By Tom Gardner Big business: About 330,000 people are employed in India's call centres, in an industry worth around £3.2 billion a year. PUBLISHED: 09:19, 18 March 2012 | UPDATED: 08:00, 19 March 2012 ______________________________________________________ Confidential personal data on hundreds of thousands of Britons is being touted by corrupt Indian call centre workers, an undercover investigation has discovered. Credit card information, medical and financial records are being offered for sale to criminals and marketing firms for as little as 2p. Two ‘consultants’, claiming to be IT workers at several call centres, met undercover reporters from The Sunday Times and boasted of having 45 different sets of personal information on nearly 500,000 Britons. Data included names, addresses, and phone numbers of credit card

Charlie Sheen’s epic flame-out earlier this year didn’t hurt his bank account much. In fact, despite getting fired from TV’s top show for his erratic behavior, he pulled in more in the last 12 months than in any previous year: $40 million . The combination of his huge earnings, his ubiquity in the press and his impressive social media following makes him the highest-ranked TV star on this year’s Forbes Celebrity 100 , coming in at # 28 . How? Well, in 2010, prior to his crash and burn, he renegotiated his “Two and a Half Men” contract. For the last season of the hit CBS show, he netted about $1.3 million per episode in upfront salary, plus another approximately $600,000 in back-end syndication fees. That comes to $1.9 million for each 22-minute show. While he was fired before the season was out, he still made 16 episodes out of the 24 scheduled, making just over $30 million (note that Forbes Celebrity earnings numbers are based on pretax gross income – see our methodol