Right, but so is relying on lack of awareness of internal policies to misrepresent client concerns in the bank's favor, for an example. A client doesn't know a

Right, but so is relying on lack of awareness of internal policies to misrepresent client concerns in the bank's favor, for an example. A client doesn't know an unexpected transaction not to be a clerical error any more than they know it to be identity theft. So it's not exactly nefarious not to immediately and unnecessarily claim culpability by using incorrect terminology. The prevalence of advertisement by banks for fraud protection and identity theft services creates a situation where people are likely to assume unexpected (or unrecognized) transactions are always the concern of the division of the bank that handles "identity theft", and that the correct way to have it investigated is to call those transactions "identity theft", whether or not they are. From how it was explained to me, using "clerical error" passes the request through an additional filter where the bank attempts to determine whether it was at fault before redirecting the request. It's the difference between starting out by saying "I made a mistake" and "a mistake was made", which could be important later. I hope you understand that I wasn't condoning fraud, but that people shouldn't be quick to implicitly admit liability for what may not be their own mistakes.