Sarah Gerathy reports:
Consumer rights advocates say ANZ bank employees may have breached privacy laws and the Trade Practices Act when they allegedly used Facebook to gather customers’ information.
It is alleged that someone in the bank’s debt collection team secretly set up a fake Facebook profile.
Using this false identity, they then befriended ANZ customers with bad credit in order to track down their current contact details.
The fake Facebook profile was set up under the name of Max Bourke, but did not mention ANZ in any way.
Read more on ABC (AU). There’s an interesting discussion of how this type of deception, frequently used offline, translates into online and what the regulatory bodies might think about it.