As someone who works in a consumer loan-related field, I know from experience that this is not correct. With very few exceptions, creditors do not have incentiv

As someone who works in a consumer loan-related field, I know from experience that this is not correct. With very few exceptions, creditors do not have incentives to barely perform identity verification. Even if 90% of identity thieves paid back their loans, the losses on the remaining 10% would swamp any profits -- and of course far fewer than 90% of identity thieves pay back their loans. Industry losses due to incorrect identity verification are in the tens of billions annually. There are many vendors that financial institutions pay big bucks to in order to improve their ability to correctly perform identity verification. However, like everything else, there are tradeoffs involved, and it is rarely if ever optimal to try to push identity fraud to nil.