Identity Theft - Identity Crisis - Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt - New York Times
The merchants of course, you call the card company, have them "chargeback" the unauthorized transactions and stick it to the merchant who allowed the fraud. Forces the industry to police its self while law enforcement agencies are otherwise strapped.
This article is by the guys who wrote "Freakonomics" and they blog at http://www.freakonomics.com/. They do a fine job of drilling down to motivations behind things. How do you prevent identify theft? There is profit in the solution, but standardization is the key. It will be interesting to see if it is driven by industry or government.
