Consumers, regulators, and businesses lack objective tools to compare the incidence of identity theft across financial institutions and without such tools, consumers cannot ‘vote with their feet’ and choose safer institutions.
Now a study by Chris Hoofnagle has analyzed 88,000 complaints submitted by victims to the FTC over a three month period in 2006 and found that Bank of America ranked highest of all firms in the study, with an average of 1,117 incidents over a three-month period. Revealing graphs after the jump.
AT&T had 763 incidents, followed by Sprint Nextel, JP Morgan, Chase and its Chase and Bank One, and Capital One. When the estimated events are divided by the total deposits, the data show that HSBC, Washington Mutual, and Bank of America have the highest rates of identity theft.
Hoofnagle said lending institutions should publicly report information about identity theft events such as the rate of identity theft; the form of identity theft attempted; whether it was a mortgage loan or credit card; and the amount of loss suffered as a result. would help consumers choose safer financial institutions.
The full study(PDF) is available from the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.
Via NY Times
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Capitalization errors and misuse of “i.e.” aside, I’m disturbed by the report.
Being consumer complaints, you have produced a tally of good old fraud, from fishing credit card numbers out of the garbage to phishing scams, yet ended up spinning the numbers into a measure of the safety of the institution.
If John Doe gets a phishing scam e-mail appearing to be from Bank of America and falls for it, is it NOT the bank’s fault.
If phishers send out millions of e-mails to Bank of America customers and one hundred to Macy’s, it’s not Bank of America’s fault.
If Macy’s customers happen to be more web savvy than Bank of America’s customers, it is not Bank of America’s fault.
If Bank of America has orders of magnitude more customers than another institution, and they have a correspondingly higher fraud count, it’s not their fault. All things even, it’s to be expected.
Finally, regarding “If data were available on this crime, consumers could choose safer institutions….” I saw no evidence whatsoever that Bank of America is any less safe than any other institution.