Business Week Online has an interesting story on whether the ID theft scare is actually hype by the media rather than an actual threat with harm being done.
The conclusion of the article is what caught my attention:
Perhaps the most spooky thing about the ID-theft scare is that chances are high the data weren’t stolen by some shadowy hacker in Estonia, after all, but someone very close to you. Fully one-fourth of the respondents in the 2003 FTC study who had been the victim of a financial fraud said they knew who had committed the crime, and in half those instances the perpetrator turned out to be a friend, relative, or neighbor.
So, like many crimes, the perpetrator is most likely to be known my the victim. As I told my wife this morning, she is more likely to kill me than anyone else is!