It’s another case of brick-and-mortar institutions losing to digital.
There were 3,813 data breaches in the first half of 2019 compared to 3,200 good old physical bank robberies in the entire 2018.
To be fair, we are not exactly comparing apples to apples.
The data figure is global, and the bank robbery figure is US-only.
But you get the idea.
Just like on ecommerce stories, data theft grew 52% year over year while bank theft is less than half what it was 15 years back.
Jaime Mejia of Verb came across these figures while reporting on the massive Ecuador data breach of 2019, which exposed the personal information of 17 million people.
Almost the entire population of Ecuador.
He found that the industry of theft is also undergoing a deep digital transformation.
You can read about it on “Hackers: what do they do with your personal information?” Now available at our online store in Spanish.