clipped from blogs.pcmag.com

Measuring Identity Theft at Top Banks

Chris Hoofnagle at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California has attempted to measure the main institutional targets of identity theft.

The data in this report comes from a complaint form the FTC provides for consumers. Because of the source there are gaps in the data which Hoofnagle recognizes, such as a focus on account takeovers as opposed to "synthetic identity theft" in which a new account is fraudulently created. And many cases of ID theft are resolved by consumers working with the institution, not involving authorities at all.

Bank of America was by far the biggest target of theft in the study, but this is not surprising considering its size. It was followed, perhaps more surprisingly, by two telecom companies, AT&T and Sprint. When looking at the number of incidents per billion dollars of deposit, Bank of America was second to HSBC, followed by Washington Mutual; this metric doesn't apply to the telecoms.