I'm amazed at how skillfully the finance and corporate community has ingrained "identity theft" into consumer's minds. (And yes, I'm using "consumer" instead of "citizen" on purpose.)
If someone uses a fake credit card to buy items from a store, they have defrauded the store and the credit card company. It should be irrelevant whether the name on that card is fake, or belongs to some other uninvolved third party.
And yet, the industry has managed to redirect the mindset and conversation to shift much of the blame onto that uninvolved third party, making them feel like they are the ones violated by this process, and leaving them with the mess to clean up while those defrauded only write off their losses after the third party goes through hoops to "prove" their own innocence. Meanwhile, there's rarely effort to go after the actual criminal at all.
I understand the reasons why there is a credit market, but I reject the notion that what was once called fraud, perpetrated against a business that is responsible for their losses, is now theft against an unrelated third party that is guilty until proven innocent by the corporate megaliths that run the financial world.