Identity Theft Rates Among Top Banks

A provocative report mentioned in Slashdot contains statistics on fraud and identity theft among financial institutions, phone companies and retailers over a 3-month period.

By virtue of the Freedom of Information Act, Chris Hoofnagle, a senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California at Berkeley, was delivered of a disc with 88,000 complaints from January, March and September of 2006 by the Federal Trade Commission.

Hoofnagle tabulated the institutions most often cited by consumers in their fraud complaints and concedes there are limitations to his study. "It needs more information to be useful to consumers," he said. "But it should be useful for banks, who themselves are probably curious what their competitors' fraud rates are.

For more information, see the full study and The New York Times Bits Technology blog.