Fergie's Tech Blog

Report: Bank of America, HSBC Most Prone to I.D. Theft

Ryan Singel writes on Threat Level:

In a first ever study of which companies have the most identity theft incidents, Bank of America, HSBC, and Washington Mutual were named as the companies with the most incidents per billions of dollars of deposits, according to a study released Wednesday by Berkeley Law School fellow Chris Hoofnagle.

Among the nations' largest banks, ING Bank looks to be the safest, with only 0.085 identity theft complaints per billion dollars of insured deposits.

In terms of sheer numbers of complaints, Bank of America, AT&T and Sprint were named most often in the complaints, followed closely by Chase, Capital One and Citibank.

The study, entitled Measuring Identity Theft at Top Banks (Version 1.0), looks to be the first-ever attempt to name-and-shame companies based on their identity theft protections, or lack thereof.

posted by Fergie @ 2/27/2008 12:11:00 PM