In America, it is very easy for corporations to put the blame for their bad security practices onto consumers and for consumers to just shrug and accept the bla

In America, it is very easy for corporations to put the blame for their bad security practices onto consumers and for consumers to just shrug and accept the blame. So, for example, "I" had "my identity" "stolen" according to Verizon. In reality, some criminals learned facts about me and then Verizon happily let them run up thousands of dollars in phone charges in a two month period. (I assume this is part of a larger scam where a 900 number pockets the charges?) This had nothing to do with me, but Verizon then polluted my credit history by falsely reporting the unpaid charges as being mine. So even though there were clearly two parties at fault—the criminals for the fraud and Verizon for not verifying the ID of the person getting the phone line and then falsely harming my credit reputation—I, an uninvolved third party, was made to do the legwork of cleaning up the mess. It's really scandalous that we allow this, but the PR of "identity theft" has been quite good at brainwashing the public.