Out of 24 of the top financial institutions in the U.S., these three banks, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Washington Mutual scored best in a test of their ability to prevent, detect and resolve ID theft, Javelin Strategy & Research said in its annual Banking Identity Safety Scorecard, released Tuesday. KeyBank and Marshall & Ilsley Bank also receive honorable mentions in the report.

Most banks do especially well in resolving identity fraud, such as dealing with disputed transactions on accounts, James Van Dyke, president of Javelin Strategy & Research, said in a presentation at American Banker's 3rd Annual Identity Theft and Fraud Symposium here.

Here is a fun quiz on protecting your identity from the Canadian Banking Association. Good Luck.

The U.S. Senate is trying to reach a deal before recessing next week on a bill that would ban the practice of impersonating someone to get telephone records, aides said on Wednesday, in light of a scandal at Hewlett-Packard Co. over how it probed news leaks.

The HP case, in which the computer maker's chairman, Patricia Dunn, hired investigators who pretended to be HP board members, employees and journalists to obtain their phone records, has given new life to legislation to outlaw the practice known as pretexting.

Several proposals are pending in the Senate and House of Representatives that would take varying degrees of action to safeguard the privacy of consumer telephone records. The Senate bill is expected to toughen criminal statutes by explicitly banning pretexting and also beef up civil penalties and improve regulatory safeguards of telephone records.