Yes, it botthered me quite a bit. This is the end result of trying to make a commodity of the documented lives of our citizens. There is a bustling black market trade in our identities. For just $75 a new identity thief can own you, or me. They access our credit and commit other crimes in our name. And who do the creditors and cops come looking for when the crime is discovered? They come looking for us.

Several years ago I tracked an identity thief across the Internet into New York, Lubbock, Tampa and Guam. My client here in Texas was a young woman who had fallen in love with a dentist in Tampa. They planned to be married and my client had given up her home and quit her job in anticipation of the happy event. The problem was the dentist never showed. I found women in New York, Tampa and Guam who had suffered the same heartbreak. The dentist was easy to fiind. He was a succesful and his wife of 14 years was his receptionist. The person impersonating him was elusive for several months. A dental technician who had worked for the dentist for three months and left under bad circumstances had chosen this way of getting back at him.

It fell to me to explain to my client the man she loved wasn't a man at all. She was a 40 year old lesbian who stated, "I just wanted to know for once in my life, what it was like to be loved by a woman as a man."