HSBC, Bank of America, and Washington Mutual suffer the highest rates of identity theft in the banking industry

HSBC, Bank of America, and Washington Mutual suffer the highest rates of identity theft in the banking industry, according to an investigative study released Wednesday by a UC Berkeley Law School researcher.The Federal Trade Commission received over 245,000 reports of identity theft in 2006, but does not typically publish the names of the financial firms and companies listed in the reports. Through an extensive Freedom of Information Act request, Chris Hoofnagle, a staff attorney at UC Berkeley's Boalt School of Law, was able to get detailed records on the individual consumer complaints.Hoofnagle received detailed information for three randomly chosen months in 2006: January, March, and September. These months included data from 88,560 complaints, with 46,262 names of institutions identified by victims.