Your paranoia is a little far-reaching here...sure a company is welcome to try that tactic but not without tarnishing their image. Try and repeat it enough times on a small scale or even once on a large enough scale there will be backlash as it will not be a smart choice to go with a compant who is constantly under-secured resulting in breaches and customer data loss. Just look at the whole Sony fiasco, er 17+ Sony fiascos rather...They were lucky to have a customer base on ps3 that are soo ADD they can't remember why they shouldnt trust the company, or theyre too young/ignorant to care about that kind of thing. Sony's biggest mistake though was in not disclosing the data breach to their customer base for a week after it had occurred...enough time for card traders and criminals to make use of that stolen data, and what could have alternatively been time psn users could have used to cancel their credit cards and start monitoring their identities. Sony blatantly disregarded theircustomer loyal customers and should feel lucky the data was not extensively used (yet) for Identity Theft, etc...