Bank size does not always correlate with safety, said Van Dyke, pointing to KeyCorp., a large regional bank based in Cleveland, Ohio. It ranked as the 4th safest bank. The next five banks, in order, were Fifth Third Bank, Wells Fargo, Marshall & Ilsley Bank, Sun Trust and Citibank.

E-Trade Financial Corp., which said last week that it had lost $18 million to fraud, was ranked 17th. TD Ameritrade Holdings Corp., which lost $4 million to ID fraud, was not ranked.

TD Ameritrade's CIO, Jerry Bartlett, agreed that eliminating risk on the consumer side is paramount. The Omaha, Neb. online brokerage offers free downloadable software so customers can scan for and eliminate data snooping programs. It also lets customers set e-mail alerts when money transfers are requested or personal account details are changed. But Bartlett was unsure whether conventional identity theft really remained a much bigger problem than fraud that began online. "We know from experience that there is a lot of sharing of user IDs and passwords. And once you begin sharing them and writing them down, you lose control of them, like throwing away personal bills without shredding them first," Bartlett said. "But I'm not sure if regular fraud is an order of magnitude larger than online fraud."