> They are also victims, but until you—often at considerable personal effort—have gotten all the debts and other bad marks by the fraudster dissociated from you

> They are also victims, but until you—often at considerable personal effort—have gotten all the debts and other bad marks by the fraudster dissociated from your identity, you are disadvantaged by it, and if you are disadvantaged or have had to pay a cost to escape that disadvantage, you are a victim, too. You seem to be misunderstanding the point badly--the situation you have described is nonsense. Firstly, what do we mean by "having your identity stolen"? I submit that this is not an attack on me as a person, it is an attack on a fictional representation of me held by a conglomerate of corporations. This is the point of OP: I am not involved in these transactions! I haven't committed a crime, purchased anything, or interacted with either the party who has defrauded this conglomerate nor this conglomerate. In fact, due to the way this information is collected and stored, I may not have ever had any direct relationship to either party. So what's happened here is that a conglomerate of companies have been defrauded and now insist that I am to make amends for it. It's nonsensical, and no amount of repeating the facts of the current situation will make it anything but ridiculous.