Here's a fascinating blog post by "Ovid" on how he caught his ID thieves in only a couple of hours. They had racked up a few thousand dollars of charges on his credit card. Maybe Ovid should be a detective, although he did get a couple of lucky breaks. Of course, the credit card companies would never have held him responsible, but it must feel good to personally catch the bad guys. His story is also being discussed on this Slashdot thread.