In a study of Berkeley Law School fellow Chris Hoofnagle, Bank of America, HSBC, and Washington Mutual are the companies with the most identity theft incidents. While these banks have the most incidents per billions of dollars of deposits, ING Bank figures with a 0.085 percent. If Chase, Capital One and Citibank weren’t named so often in complaints, Bank of America, AT&T and Sprint were.
According to Hoofnagle, people have the right to know the institutions with identity theft problems. Starting as a privacy and consumer rights advocate at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, through an open-government request, he registered the over 88,000 complaints filed to the Federal Trade Commission. Though, the companies’ names aren’t published.
Yet, all the efforts are done for the customer’s safety.
Hoofnagle presented some statistics regarding the number of incidents. No data are available for telecoms companies. But he is optimist that the future studies will offer something more than rough data.
The FTC records are the main resource when talking about identity theft, but actually the costumers are the ones who provide them and the police reports reported to banks, cell phone companies or credit bureaus are not mentioned.
FTC doesn’t make a clear distinguish between the diverse categories of fraud: the new accounts in a persons' name and the stolen credit card to make purchases; identity theft committed through phishing emails and the none-Internet one.
According to Betty Riess, spokeswoman for Bank of America, security is an ever concerning problem: "Protecting customer information is a top priority at BoA and we have multiple layers of security". The online security offerings from RSA are used by BoA and the costumers can deal with the one-time credit card numbers. |
