What are the costliest mistakes that dealers are making? If you have to stack rank A, like what are those like top three that you're seeing from a compliance, regulatory, just what are those three things? I'm actually going to go back to one that's a little bit older and a little bit under the radar, because I think this is a sleeper huge financial issue for dealers and that's red flags. So there are requirements under federal law to basically verify the identity of someone that you're going to extend part of to. That's a basketball or simplification, but that's essentially what you have to do.
And the reality is that's one of these lines, because being compliant with that rule is going to stop identity fees from basically stealing cars from you. And I've talked to dealers that mid-sized dealers that lose over a million dollars a year to identity theft, because as most of you know, the contracts can come back on you as the dealer and you're stuck with the bad deal when the finance company kicks it back to you because there was an identity thief involved. So that to me is sort of low hanging fruits or something that dealers could probably tighten up.
Easily and save them money today. Data security and privacy, the breach, I mean, CDK aside, you know, there was a large dealer group in the West Coast that had a direct hack themselves that they were down. This ransomware events happened unfortunately routinely with dealers, and these are real hard costs the dealers have to face today. Text messaging still has some inherent risks.
And the reason is because they're statutory damages. If you have a law that says you break it, you get X dollars per violation, that's going to attract planners lawyers like flies to honey. So that was a real problem for a long time. Still is a problem. It's become a little bit better because of some of the rules and some of the policies that have been placed at dealerships. But that, you know, I've said for a long time, bring this down to the dealer world.
That's one of the many reasons you got to make sure you understand what your salespeople are doing with their personal phones with consumers, right? I mean, let's bring this to the real world. People communicate on the phone at the time, right? Salespeople are human. They do things the way that everybody wants to do things. Dealers have to really think about the risks and the potential liabilities that could bring to you as a dealer having that unfettered.
You've got to take controls over that. You have to have records to show what you're going to do because there still are some risks out there from from those communications, especially market communications. If I'm doing triage, there's sort of my top two or three from a pure financial perspective today for dealerships.