Clark's friend former Georgia governor Roy Barnes recently told him that he has become an ID theft victim. Barnes got a call from American Express wanting to know if he had opened a second AMEX account, which he had not. So he pulled his credit report and found 7 new applications for cards that a New York-based ID thief had been filling out. The credit card companies were just sending cards in Barnes name to the ID thief. After dealing with all 3 of the major credit bureaus, Barnes has special venom for Equifax for allegedly being impossible to deal with. He had a good experience with Experian, and a neutral one with TransUnion.

If this happens to you, Barnes says you must keep perfect notes and write down the agent code of everyone you speak with on the phone. Barnes has a file for every card the thief opened. But this criminal is still out there opening accounts in his name. This guy was a governor and he's going through this! He'll be fine, but 10 million of us deal with some level of ID theft every year. There's no effective marketplace solution yet.