You said it in your comment and I've seen it in other posts here on HN. It shouldn't be called identity theft. It should be called fraud. That's what it is.

The idea of an identity, especially a permanent one that travels with you throughout your life, is a relative recent one. 200 years ago, you could escape your past sins, so long as you didn't have an identifiable face and could speak the language at your destination. (If you couldn't you ran the very real risk of becoming a slave, which is caused by removing a person from their context; e.g. family, language and community).

There is a deeper question of "What is an identity?" and we also have to realize that the digital identities have never existed throughout history. Not in the way they do today. It's hard for us to imagine a world before passports, before real borders and before permanent numbers and documents that follow citizens throughout their lives.

And the principal reason we have digital identities today? Debt. It is solely to trace debt. It has nothing to do with proving you went to x university or worked at y job. There are other ways to track that, which are terribly inaccurate when you really start to look at them. The principal reason for your SSN, your digital identity, is to track credit and debt. I highly recommend the book _Debt: The First 5,000 Years_. It really goes into depth on this concept.