Spotlight: Bob Sullivan
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But there are risks to online banking.

There are a few data points that show that identity thieves are raiding people's online bank accounts. Of course they are; it would be an easy way to get money. But I don't have any sense that it's a worse problem than, say, Dumpster diving or one of the other more traditional theft methods.

You've been outspoken about the danger of identity theft via cell phones. How big of a problem is it?

I think that has been a very underreported area of identity theft, and a very common one. We hear a lot of dramatic stories about identity theft, about people losing their homes and home equity loans being taken out. Those stories are quite real but they're fairly rare, so you're not likely to encounter that yourself. But it is very likely that someone will try to hijack your cell phone account and take out a cell phone in your name. The Federal Trade Commission's data from last year showed that 8 percent of identity theft involved a cell phone -- which is a lot.

How does it work?

They hack into the accounts. I just did a story about some fellow who had 14 phones added to his account. I called it "The friends and family and identity thieves plan." The thieves just said they were him and added phones. Not only did he then get these (monthly) bills for like $5,000, but he had his service turned off constantly because they kept saying he hadn't paid his bill. He talked to the fraud department who talked to the billing department who waived the problem and it came back again. He was on the hook for five or six months. The thieves even extended his contract to two years!

I don't know how you put a price tag on those kinds of hassles. That's a clear case that Sprint, in this case, did absolutely no vetting of the person they sold the phone to because somebody wanted the commission. In the end, it probably costs Sprint next to nothing to sell the airtime to these thieves; they didn't lose very much money. But this guy (the victim) is a real estate agent; he lost numerous hours and who knows what kind of sales or opportunities he might have lost, and that's just not in any of these equations.

One major failing of consumer protection laws in our country is that there is very rarely any accounting for time lost. Time is a really big factor in all of this. Over and over, you hear credit card companies say, "Oh, consumers aren't out any money." But they are out a lot of time, and time is money for a lot of people.