Matt Richtel reports that the accomplices who enable identity theft may be their own financial institutions.
What is less obvious is one of the report’s central conclusions: that financial institutions are contributing to the theft by failing to take obvious steps to prevent it. “The majority of credit card fraud is the result of financial institutions’ leniency in the account-opening process,” according to the report. It said thieves used victims’ identities to open fraudulent accounts and then used those accounts, for example, to launder money.