Spotlight: Bob Sullivan
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The reason identity theft exists is because you and I can walk into a Best Buy tomorrow with empty pockets and walk out with a $2,000 television set for signing our name on a few forms. And so can the criminals. That's the way that the system has been set up.

I really think it is only barely an overstatement to call it a marketing plan by credit card companies. Their fraud dials are set so low that they know that a certain amount of the applications they receive and the purchases they process are fraud, but that's just the cost of doing business to them. It would be more expensive for them to protect us and reject some of those applications, so they choose not to. And the collateral damage is us. And "us" is still 10 million people a year. It comes at an enormous price.

But zero liability insurance now protects most cardholders, right?

The protection is real. I've had to use it. And for a lot of people, it is pretty trivial to get things removed from their credit card. I would not want to be completely dismissive of it. But people might, by extension, say oh, identity theft is not that big a deal.

I can happily go up the chain of severity with you, but just one step across from credit card identity theft is debit card identity theft, which is a whole different beast, even though it too now has zero liability insurance. But let me tell you, when you're traveling and your checking account suddenly has a zero balance, it's a problem, a big problem.

I've talked to many people who have been in this situation where an identity thief drains their bank account and they have automatic online bill pay, they send off their nine monthly bills and all of them come back with overdraft charges, and now they've got several weeks' or months' worth of things to untangle. Again, zero liability, and in the end you usually come out OK, but it is not a neutral event in your life.

We love the convenience of online banking. Is it a problem or a solution?

I think online banking is a great thing because it helps you keep much closer tabs on what's going on with your account. The best recommendation I give people is to use online banking and, every couple of days, just take a very quick glance at your account to look for reasonableness. "Oh, there should be about $4,000 in there and that's what it says." You don't have to spend hours and hours at it; 30 seconds and you'll catch pretty quickly if something is wrong.