The root cause of identity theft in USA and some other places is the lack of "proper" national identity and the associated use of various personal "secrets" (not that secret) for identity verification because there are no good easy other ways.

Businesses in Scandinavia and many other countries would not treat someone knowing your personal information as any evidence of identity (because it's not); having all that information is not sufficient to impersonate you there - identity theft does happen but it would require stealing or forging physical documents or actual credentials to things like bank accounts; knowing all of what your mother or spouse would know is not enough to e.g. get credit or get valuable goods in your name.

The US has no single national photo + chip ID card that is available to everybody, for free, including illegal and semi-illegal immigrants and homeless people with no access to their birth certificate and such.

It's completely crazy to me that you can be "out of status" with the USCIS and still get a social security card and a bank account, for example.

It absolutely isn't free here in Norway either, around $86 is what I'd have to pay now to get an id card as an adult (same price as a passport but easier to carry).

"Identity theft" is newspeak right up there with "intellectual property". It serves the sole purpose of diminishing real theft. If someone says "we gave all your money to this other guy, but it's not our fault because he had stolen your identity" doesn't make it so. There are cases of mistaken identity, and with criminal intentions, but there is also an enormous majority of not checking identity because someone was lazy.

Which is what leads to this comedy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E

"Identity theft" is a term invented to push the responsibility for fraud back on the person who is being impersonated rather than on the person or organization that failed to properly identify the impersonator.

This is such an excellent comment (along with SoftTalker's reply) and made me think. I've long rejected the term "intellectual property", along with the delusional/fraudulent term "artificial intelligence" (as opposed to real things like LLMs and machine learning) and "money laundering" but hadn't previously stopped to think about "identity theft". Now I have.

I believe that it's really important to consider the validity of terms that are heavily adopted and pushed around and whether you should use them yourself or call them out as intellectually vapid/dishonest.

Just knowing someone's name, address, and ID number isn't enough to like, open a bank account in their name or such. You'd need a proper ID card or passport for that. Similar thing with most businesses if you try to pay for some product with credit, they won't accept just a few digits and a pinky promise, you'll need to identify yourself properly (the BankID app for instance).

We just change our identity every three years or so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK2gKuqbOHo

> How do they handle identity thefts

By just accepting it as a normal fact of life that you will have some random stuff ordered in your name sooner or later with an invoice you'll have to dispute. Happened to a relative of mine, police do not care unless they order things above a certain value, without a police report you cannot get free ID protection, and then you'll have to sit for a long time in phone queues trying to cancel a subscription for a streaming service or whatever they ordered while get thrown around by support reps who go "you SURE you or someone in your family didn't order this?"

That sounds rather unacceptable.

Yes, I don't think anyone truly wants it to be like this. But it's just what happens.

You of course cannot access and empty out someone's bank account this way, you're safe in that regard. But you need to dispute the invoices as soon as possible to show that it is fradulent, so you don't end up needing to actually pay for it. Or get debt collectors after you.

^ Never had this happen in my 30 years here so YMMW

So don't take this poster by their word.

Not saying it DOES NOT happen as it is a system not made for the internet. But widespread? It is not.

Never happened to anyone I know either.

It basically never happens. I don't know where the GP got their story from.

I am Swedish and never had this happen to me. Never had random things show up or ordered for me at all. What would the point be, you have to pay or get an invoice? For Klarna they use BankID so only I can order an invoice for myself in reputable shops.

I am in my 30s btw so I was alive before BankID and it was a worse time. Remember my parents paid bills with paper.

The OP didn't claim it had happened to you. What they said is that it is possible to use the information about regular individuals that is publicly available to cause harm, and there are no attempts to stop this.

It is possible but it is not widespread.

Go back and edit your original comment because it is irrelevant and misleading.

No, I don't think I will.

There are plenty of reports online about how identity theft is becoming widespread in Sweden. The fact that something didn't happen to you is not evidence.

https://ocindex.net/assets/downloads/2025/english/ocindex_pr...

https://swedenherald.com/article/biometric-data-to-stop-fals...

That is absolutely not a normal fact of Scandinavian life. Gross exaggeration and misrepresentation.

It's just a unique ID of a person, it's not a password. I don't see how you can be confused by this.

It's also "anyone's brokerage account holdings, addresses, phone numbers" according to the comment that this subthread of the conversation is about.

It only gives read permissions, to make any changes requires a password.

So?

Unlike American SSNs, which are secret and wield certain authoritative powers, a Scandinavian "person number" is neither secret nor authoritative. Common misconception.

Of course ID theft happens but I think one thing that differs is that in Sweden it is harder to get a loan without verification that you are who you are (for example by Swedish BankID wish is an electronic id) while in US it seems you can take a loan if you just know someone’s social security number

they don't handle it at all. they let it go on. you for example have hundreds of people falsely registering their place of residence as somebody else's home, which causes massive problems for that home owner or apartment resident, and there is nothing done about it at all.

These types of laws are designed for the 1950s where there were natural barriers to acquiring and disseminating information. There is no attempt whatsoever to update them and to reduce harm caused to the average citizen today.

Just knowing the personal number is not enough to do much with. To get access to services, verify who you are on when talking to companies there is a verification step, most commonly with the BankID app.

Visual example: https://images.ctfassets.net/b2dmfxhmyqno/1cD0YDHjd9DGZnWfjH...

Identity theft and spam still happens, just not through knowing the personal number.