It is a firm you will never have heard of – but it boasts that it knows everything about you.
From your salary to the ages of your children and even which DVD you rented last weekend, B2C Data has a ‘rich and complex’ picture of every family in Britain.
Minutes into a phone conversation with our undercover reporter, the firm’s sales director boasted it held 5,000 pieces of personal information for every household.
‘Literally we know what clothes they buy, what health products they buy, where they go on holiday, how many times they go on holiday, what income they’ve got, whether they have children,’ sales director Gareth Doran – a convicted fraudster – boasted from his home in Marbella.
Days later, over a pot of tea in a London hotel, his silver-haired colleague Nick Sayer casually revealed how this shadowy company had compiled such an extraordinary amount of data. Flashing his expensive silver watch as he sipped, he said he had persuaded 250 British companies trusted by millions to pass on detailed information about their customers.
Perhaps most shockingly of all, he claimed to have access to individuals’ financial information – including confidential details of the size of their pension pots.
The information was obtained, he claimed, via a secret agreement between B2C and the UK’s largest financial advice group. Through this deal – kept secret from customers under a non-disclosure agreement – he claimed he was able to access confidential details handed to mortgage advisers who worked with the finance firm. In return, he maintained their customer database for free.
‘Whenever you fill in a mortgage application, you have to give your employment, your income, any investments,’ he explained. ‘We get all that information on a million people.’
Supplying the financial data of 15,000 pensioners and investors to the Mail’s fictional cold-calling company would be ‘no problem’.
Sayer claimed to have similar deals with 250 household-name firms – including a high-street retail giant and a well-known holiday company. As a result, B2C had compiled an extraordinarily detailed picture of the lives of millions, he said.
Every time someone books a holiday, buys a TV or applies for a mortgage with one of the major firms who supply data, B2C gets an update for its massive database. ‘It’s amazing,’ he grinned. ‘The more you dig into it... you think: Crikey, they know everything about us.’
The amount of data B2C holds – and the way it is selling it – was described by the Information Commissioner last night as ‘on the face of it, a very worrying breach of the Data Protection Act’.
When explaining where B2C got its data from, Sayer claimed it was all agreed under a secret deal with the financial advice network Sesame – which processes one in six mortgage applications in the UK.
Sesame furiously denies any deal with B2C or Sayer and says it does not sell its customers’ data under any circumstances. Last night independent experts compared a sample of the data provided to the Mail with that from Sesame and confirmed the data was categorically not on Sesame’s database.
An urgent investigation is now underway into how Sayer was able to provide us with pensions and investments data on 15,000 people.
During the meeting, Sayer – the production director in charge of building B2C’s huge database – smilingly admitted he had been dubbed a wheeler-dealer ‘Del Boy’ by friends but insisted the label was unfair.
He did admit it was his third attempt at running a data company, after giving up his career as a professional diver. But he shrugged: ‘It’s all business partner problems. First one done me for a load of money, second one turned out to be a cocaine addict and never showed up.’ Sayer admitted the trade in personal data was a ‘cut throat kind of industry’. There were, he said, ‘a lot of very, very unscrupulous people in data’ – adding quickly: ‘I like to think I’m not one of them.’
But when the reporter told him she wanted to start a cold-calling operation selling investments to pensioners, he was more than happy to sell the salary, pension and investment details of 15,000 people, along with their addresses, ages and telephone numbers.
No checks were made on who our reporter’s firm was, or for what it intended to use this information.
The most basic enquiries would have revealed that the outfit he was selling to was fictional, as were the names he was given. The ‘investment firm’ comprised no more than a website and a few business cards. Yet Sayer said he had ‘no problem’ handing over as many pension records as desired. ‘Rich people,’ he said. ‘You want people with the biggest pension pots you can find.’
Selling data on pensions was routine business for B2C, he said – particularly at the moment.
Pensions were currently ‘hot business’ and the company was selling on its detailed pension pot information ‘ten times a month, maybe’.
‘Everyone wants to know everything about these people,’ Sayer added. ‘So for example, you’ll want the pension data, and you’ll want to know what their pension pot is, what their income is, what sort of house value they’ve got, all that kind of stuff, which is fine.
‘I don’t mind putting all that on the data for you. I’ve got no problem with that.’ However, he said our cold-callers should be careful not to reveal much information they had on people. ‘Because we get a million people phoning us up saying, “How do you know that?”.’ Days after the Mail’s meeting with Sayer, our undercover reporters called sales director Doran, confirming we would like to buy the pensions data. Incredibly, Doran even suggested to our reporter that she could buy the data off the books – outside of the B2C business – as a way of avoiding the tax payable.
Doran, who has served a jail sentence for fraud after he was caught using fake bank notes, said this would be a ‘favour to a friend’.
He suggested she transfer £5,000 straight into Sayer’s personal bank account to seal the deal, promising the data would be sent straight afterwards. When she told him she would rather buy the data through the business, he agreed – but asked that she ‘please just keep the other option that we did talk about just between ourselves’.
When the Mail contacted the people on the database B2C sold us, they were understandably horrified. Not one of them had agreed for their financial information to be stored, used or sold in this way. Nor had they heard of B2C. However, many had long suspected they were on a list as they had repeatedly been targeted by cold-call conmen.
Disturbingly, some of the scammers even seemed to know details of their shares and investments – and had tried to use that information to rip them off.
But why would firms risk their reputations by handing over sensitive financial data? Sayer explained that all firms need to have their customer databases ‘cleaned’, a laborious process which involves updating every detail.
As a result, they outsource the work but that can cost them between £1million and £2million a year, Sayer said. B2C offered to do it for free – as long as they could keep all the data.
The firms involved did not want to be publicly associated with B2C Data, he said. ‘I don’t normally tell anyone their names any more – it’s kind of a non-disclosure thing.’
Last night B2C Data Ltd denied any wrongdoing, saying the company abided by all the proper laws and regulations of its industry. It confirmed that Gareth Doran had been suspended pending an investigation into the allegations he tried to sell data outside the business.
Defiant: He reveals how the information is then sold to firms of cold-callers.
Daily Mail