Michigan firm sues bank over theft of $560,000

In its response, Comerica claimed that EMI's loss was solely its own fault. "Valid credentials assigned to an EMI employee were used to authenticate a logon for purposes of online banking transactions," the bank said. "If some unknown criminals used those credentials, rather than the EMI employee to whom they had been entrusted, this was caused solely by the actions of that EMI employee."

The bank also said it should have been obvious "to any reasonably alert person" that the phishing site where the EMI employee entered the company's banking credentials was not a legitimate site.

Neither EMI nor Comerica responded immediately to a request for comment. The case is not scheduled to go to trail until the end of this year.

The dispute is similar to several other disputes in front of courts around the country. One example is a lawsuit involving Lubbock, TX-based PlainsCapital bank and its customer Hilary Machinery Inc of Plano, which was robbed of over $800,000 in a fashion very similar to EMI. In that case however, it is the bank that has filed a lawsuit asking a federal district court to absolve it of any blame.

In Illinois, a couple whose bank account was robbed has been allowed to sue their bank for its alleged failure to implement the latest security measures designed to prevent such compromises.

Meanwhile, in New York, the Town of Poughkeepsie is slamming its bank, TD Bank NA for failing to notice or stop numerous unauthorized transfers totaling over $500,000 from its account.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at @jaivijayan or subscribe to Jaikumar's RSS feed . His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com.

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