How safe is your bank?

吕颖

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, regulators cannot allocate oversight and enforcement resources to high-risk institutions and practices, and businesses themselves cannot assess how well they perform relative to competitors in fighting this crime. Now a study by Chris Hoofnagle has analyzed 88,000 complaints submitted by victims to the Federal Trade Commission 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. 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 shows 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 is available (pdf) from the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology