DAVID LAZARUS

• David Lazarus is a familiar name to the readers of the San Francisco Chronicle business pages, and the reporter appears occasionally on television news shows like This Week in Northern California on the local PBS affiliate. As a successful middle class professional, he probably never thought he would become the victim of an illegal alien, but that assumption would have been very wrong indeed. Mr. Lazarus recounts his experience of identity theft by a Jamaican national Derrick Davis, who used Lazarus' social security number to get nine credit cards and several jobs. Lazarus called his troubles a "royal pain," one that "has made my own life miserable." But David Lazarus is lucky because his own reporting skills helped him investigate the case, unlike most of the nearly 700,000 Americans hit by identity theft every year. While Lazarus has the pleasure of seeing the perp behind bars, many victims have to work for years to get their lives straightened out, if they ever do.