Attention to details

Do you ever worry about giving your bank and credit card details over the phone? I've started to get allergic to all those disembodied call centre conversations where you hand over all your financial details to a teenager with an attention deficit disorder.

How do I know they're not going to write down all my credit card details on the back of their hand and sell them for a round of drinks in the pub?

How can I be sure that some techie in a Whitesnake T-shirt, bored of reading everyone's personal emails, isn't spending his night shift surfing my bank details? And how much information are we obliged to give when we're making a transaction or getting a quote from a bank or an insurance company?

The other day I had my hackles raised when I rang a bank about a loan. After a half hour of detailed questions about my financial health, I was given a quote that turned out to be not just for a loan but for what was glossed over as a "package".

This was really an attempt to hustle me into buying life and critical illness insurance, even though I'd never asked for it. I'd been frisked for all that information for a sales pitch.

A follow-up call from the bank took on an even more Kafkaesque quality, when the caller made all kinds of incorrect claims about what had been agreed, only to backtrack by saying: "It's not me not telling the truth, it's the screen that's saying it."

This application didn't go any further, but by then they knew more about my finances than my bank manager.

Although this was annoying, at least with banks, there should be a decent security system in place to protect any information divulged.

Brian Capon of the British Bankers' Association says that "protection of personal details is given the highest priority. Information collected by the bank cannot be passed on to other parts of the group for marketing purposes".

Putting that into practice, First Direct says this means measures such as running police record checks on staff and setting up a tracking system to show exactly who has accessed a customer's account.

But you never really know who is at the other end of the phone. And Brian Capon warns against calls which claim to be from a bank, but might be from fraudsters.

"There have been cases where a bank card has been stolen with a telephone number or address. The thief phones the victim pretending to be either the police or the bank, tells them their card has been found and 'for security reasons' needs to know the PIN number. If this happens, it is virtually certain to be a scam," he says.

When you're making purchases over the phone it can be an even bigger leap in the dark. If you're booking a flight or sending flowers, it involves giving your home address and card numbers and expiry date to a complete stranger. You probably don't even know which city they're in.

More recently, retailers have also started asking for the numbers on the signature panel on the back as another form of verification. The illegal use of stolen card details is on the increase. But Sandra Quinn of the Association for Payment Clearing Services says that at least customers who are victims of such fraud don't have to pick up the bill, as any losses are refunded.

But one thing you can't get back from call centres is the amount of time and aggravation that it can cost. In my experience, mobile phone call centre staff have perfected the tone that says their shift's just about to finish and they couldn't give a monkey's about your inquiry.

Banks advise that you should only give your details to companies you trust. But life has its own black humour and you can be badly disappointed when it comes to trusting.

This happened to me in a rather bitter way last week. We went to Disneyland Paris with the children, and out of all the Disney characters, my favourite has always been Baloo, the laid-back bear in Jungle Book.

They say never meet your heroes, and that would have been good advice. Because trying to keep warm in the snow, we made a reservation for a restaurant, only to be turfed out when we arrived because it was going to be used for a launch party for Jungle Book 2.

So as they made room for smiling old Baloo to waddle in, we were driven out into the snow, young children crying, without so much as a bread stick between us.

If there was a call centre for Betrayed Fans of Baloo, I'd be dialling now.