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from Pravda.RU on Wednesday, February 19, 2003

It seems that the company does not care about its clients at all.

Russian media have caused a commotion regarding the fact that the client base of Russia's largest cellular operator has been stolen. Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) allegedly conducts the internal investigation of the incident. There is no information about the process of the investigation, though. Compact disks containing the stolen confidential information are now available on market places and on the Internet. However, no one tries to detect the thieves and to organize a demonstrative trial on them, convicting them to the maximum imprisonment. Mobile TeleSystems did not even ask law-enforcement bodies for help, as if everything is quiet and nothing happened. It seems that nobody cares about the fact of human rights violations - the rights, which are guaranteed by the Russian law, by the way. Even MTS clients evince no wish to stand up for their rights. They do not hurry to sue the cellular operator.

The following letter was sent to the company Mobile TeleSystems on February 6th. However, no response has been received yet.

"Good afternoon!
Today I received an email, the contents of which can be seen below. As a client of the cellular communication company MTS, I would like to find out, which measures the company is going to take in connection with this problem. There is a telephone number mentioned in the email that I received. There is a mailbox on userline.ru mail system. They ask to email orders to that mailbox. It is possible to find out the sender's whereabouts on that website. As a responsible person from the online newspaper PRAVDA.Ru, I would like to see or to hear the comments from MTS's competent people regarding their work on the issue."

The email that has been distributed on the Russian Internet today arrived in PRAVDA.Ru's office mailbox as well:

"From: "МТS"
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 7:43 PM
Subject: MTS telephones database

There is an opportunity to search the database with:
- a telephone number;
- name, middle name, last name;
- legal entity name;
- tax-payer identification code of a legal entity.

Search results are categorized as follows:

For natural persons:
- telephone number of seven digits without the code, bill payment, the characteristics of the person to contact, the characteristics of the person, who signed the contract;
- name, middle name, last name, birth date, citizenship, passport series number, passport's issuer, residing address.

For legal entities:
- telephone number of seven digits without the code, the characteristics of the person to contact, his initials and full name, his birth date, citizenship, passport data are possible to be shown as well. The same things will be shown for the person, who signed the contract.
- legal entity's name, the tax-payer's identification code, address and telephone number.

The unique compact disk costs $150. Our emails: saleslove@userline.ru or bd2004@uol.com.ar Telephone number: 8-926-227-92-87. Please call from 10 a.m. till 9 p.m.

P.S. The given email was sent according to part 4 of article 29 of the Russian Federation Constitution and in compliance with part 1 of article 27 of the Federal Law of February 16th, 1995. Your email address was obtained from open sources. You can unsubscribe from the list by replying to this message, putting 'Delete' in the subject line."

This is what we and many other people found in mailboxes today. The strange and unexplainable silence of the Russian major cellular communication company can not but cause anxiety. The seller of the stolen goods does not hide his identity, having mentioned the contact information in the body of the email. It seems that it would not be a hardship for security services or law-enforcement bodies to investigate the matter carefully. However, there is an impression that the MTS administration does not care about their own subscribers, as well as about the information that clients entrusted the company on the confidential basis. MTS assures that there has been only a part of the client database stolen. The company counts six million clients in total. Everyone is left to guess, if the thieves got the confidential data at their disposal or not.

When the fact of the stolen client database came into the public eye, it caused a commotion for mass media. This news was a piece of sensation that editors of every newspaper and magazine demand from reporters daily. The sensation is gone, although it is still not known, if MTS addressed to law-enforcement bodies, if there were criminal proceedings instituted on the fact of stealing the confidential information and its further commercial use. Respectable Western companies would hold daily briefings in this case. They would not be that slow with their police report. If there is a suspicion that a company's employee is implicated in a scandal, it would make everything a lot faster for a Western company. However, we live in Russia. This is probably the explanation of the company's indifference to its own failures.

Who stole the client database of the company, and what should be done about that? As it was informed, MTS has been conducting the internal investigation for more than a weak already. Nevertheless, according to the information from Gazeta.Ru website, MTS's internal security service does not question its employees that have access to the database. As it was said, the security service of the company used other methods in its work to investigate the incident. It was not specified, which methods were used in particular. The investigation has not led to any results yet. They just keep saying that it is still going on.

Which versions are there to explain the situation? It goes without saying that the first version draws the suspicion aside from MTS itself. It was reported that the client database was allegedly stolen by negligent special services employees, who were on duty in MTS offices during the hostage crisis in Moscow's music theatre in October. They could access all the information about the company's clients. Yet, it is obvious that it would be too dangerous to insist on such version. That is why, MTS does not insist on it. Eva Prokofyeva, the press secretary of the cellular company said that the MTS administration was rather sceptic about the version of special services agents: "We have nothing to claim from them. We do not link the hostage crisis events and the fact that the client database of the company has been stolen," said she.

However, the public relations center of the Russian Federal Security Bureau (FSB) stated such a possibility is absolutely out of the question, since there was absolutely no internal investigation conducted on the fact of stealing the client database. "We perform our activities on the ground of the law "About efficient and investigation operations on court approval," said the FSB press service. Furthermore, FSB agents can access the information of cellular companies on court approval "within the scope of an undertaking." In other words, if special services suspect something about a cell company client, agents will not be able to access the information of other clients. This is what Gazeta.Ru believes about the whole matter. There is no reason not to believe the website.

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