Identity Thieves Create Fake Identities

In a new twist to identity theft, thieves have started creating "synthetic" identities by stealing a person's social security number and "tying" it to a different name in order to create a new, fictional person. This is much harder to detect because the frauds are not committed in the victim's name so they do not readily appear on their credit reports. At the same time, the social security number may appear in many different databases, including those used for background checks. This type of theft is also much more difficult to recover from, because there is no way to