Fraud departments provide a pretty useful service to consumers. The existing finance system is so much larger than the Bitcoin economy that it's no surprise if they, in total, rival Bitcoin in energy intensity. It processes orders of magnitude more transactions and provides other services that people use that have no Bitcoin equivalents.

This isn't a defense of the modern financial system, which is arguably a trash fire for plenty of reasons, but of course it's fairly energy intensive. It's massive. If it were replaced entirely by Bitcoin, it would be even more intensive.