Johannesburg - A father and son were arrested for allegedly uploading recordings to the Internet from the Afriforum recruitment call centre, the lobby group CEO Kallie Kriel said on Thursday.
“The men are not employees of AfriForum but are employed at the call centre. The father was recently fired for misconduct and the son confessed that he gave the recordings to his father,” he said.
“The two recordings they published on the Internet form part of the training mechanism used at the call centre to train operators to speak to callers. There was no unauthorised access to our membership database.”
Kriel said AfriForum contracted the call centre and asked them to not use the recordings of their members for training to protect their information.
AfriForum became aware of the two recordings, posted on YouTube, on Wednesday and took steps by asking the police to investigate and also got IT specialists.
“The data of our members is safe. The men claim they have a million recordings which is not true, we do not even have a million members,” Kriel said.
“One of the men confessed and they were arrested yesterday (Thursday) and spent the night in jail. This confirms that our security measures work and our main concern is protecting our members at all times.”
He said an example should be made of the men and other companies that work with data should ensure they have security measures in place.
“The men wanted to create fear by saying they have all the recordings and were getting paid to leak them. It is not true,” he said.
“Two leaked recordings are two too many, we will ensure that the law takes its course.”
Pretoria police spokeswoman Captain Colette Weilbach confirmed on Friday that Afriforum opened a case against two men.
She said the charges against them were related to the Electronic Communications and Transaction Act. - Sapa