Phone record snooping a common business tool

NEW YORK — Although the boardroom scandal at Hewlett-Packard Co. made the practice more widely known, buying phone records or other personal information obtained by “pretext” calls appears to have been common in parts of the business world.

In a letter to the House Energy and Commerce committee, which was investigating the issue this year, data broker PDJ Investigative Services described its customers as “law offices, repossession companies, financial institutions, collection agencies, bail enforcement agencies, law enforcement agencies and various private investigation and research companies.”

“Those businesses have a common need. That need is to be able to locate individuals, who do not wish to be found,” another data broker, Universal Communications Co., wrote to the committee.

For example, banks sought to find debtors who defaulted on loan payments, and car finance companies traced people who stopped paying their auto loans and disappeared, Universal Communications said.

PDJ sold records of local and long-distance calls as well as non-published phone numbers and home addresses, according to an old price list submitted to the House committee.

In its letter, PDJ said it did not perform pretext calls itself, but paid independent vendors for the information, or searched public databases and the Internet.

Robert Douglas, a privacy consultant in Colorado who closely follows pretexting and other investigatory techniques, said such independent vendors use sophisticated methods to fool customer service representatives into giving out information.

However, the attention given to pretexting in the past two years — the HP scandal is just the latest in a series of revelations — has made data brokers restrict sales of certain kinds of information.

Cell phone companies, one of the major targets of pretexters, also have fought back by launching lawsuits.

Public attention on the matter was kick-started in January, when the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the city’s police department was warning officers that lists of their cell phone calls were available for sale online.

PDJ told the House committee that it voluntarily stopped selling cell-phone records last year. Its current Web site lists no call record services. It still can determine phone numbers that correspond to a given name or address.