Experian, you have some explaining to do
This area of finance is utterly, completely backwards and seems like one of the most (evil)successful bits of proper-burden reversal in existence. The entire concept of "identity theft" as it exists now is 100% pure industry propaganda. Nobody is cloning bodies and transplanting brains or something. It's not that anyone is "stealing my identity" it's the financial institutions don't bother to verify it and then somehow have managed to make a system where this is my problem. If I haven't chosen to have a business relationship with a given financial institution or credit bureau, and they choose to give somebody else financial services, it shouldn't matter if that person used my name or widely circulated information about me, anything less then full biometrics/video for signup and establishing mutual certificates and cryptographically signed interactions thereafter should be presumptively invalid. If Person M lies to a Bank A about their info claiming to be Person A and tries to escape their commitments sure they've committed fraud, but if the Bank A then tries to go after Person A then the bank are literally accessories to fraud and should face criminal prosecution or at the least massive financial penalties (with both expenses and punitive fines paid to Person A). If the banks want to have private credit bureaus to help them with scaling, abstracting and reducing bias in the risk aspect sure; there are reasonable arguments for that. But said credit bureaus should have no role in identity verification, and if they are lying about people (claiming financial things about them which are not true) that again should be on them, with serious statutory penalties.All the burdens are completely backwards, in turn massively perverting the incentives. And it's eternally infuriating. Some rando applying for a credit line on the opposite side of the country should be Not My Problem, 100% of the time, whether they have my name or address or a random symmetric 9 digit number some government assigned me. All the tools exist for financial institutions to manage their risk/convenience tradeoff, but they're the ones who have the power, information and should have the incentive to do so. They are externalizing onto the general public instead.