Thank you for your post. For someone struggling with serial affairs it is often an addiction situation and I would recommend a sexual addiction therapist. I would also recommend Sex Addicts Anonymous for continual support. I unfortunately am not an addiction therapist so do not have more information to provide to you. I apologize for that. 😔

So, this story was about twice as long when I first filed it. For space reasons, and also to keep the narrative flowing, we had to cut a lot out.

I had originally written a lot more about my conversation with Shima Baughman, particularly her work on what she calls "the police myth": the belief that the law enforcement exists to control and solve crime. Statistically speaking, they do not. Certainly not for cyber crime, but also not really for traditional crime. Her work on clearance rates showed 97% of people who commit burglary are not held responsible for their crime by police.

I think identity theft and other cyber crimes are newer types of crime, and law enforcement - from the FBI down to local police - are more invested in violent and property crime. In my piece about potential solutions for identity theft, I wrote about how tracking cyber crime like those other types of crime would be a good start.

People need to make more noise about this. A lot of victims of identity theft and other cyber crimes - stalking and harassment, scams, revenge p*rn, etc - are ashamed. They blame themselves. Don't be. Reaching out to your representatives (over email, or even just tagging them on Twitter) and asking why the FBI doesn't track cyber crime is a good place to start.

I didn't know they each had apps! It'll look into that next time I'm expecting to unfreeze my credit.

Say you report an ID theft via police report — as I recently had to — and the police never contact you. Were you ever assigned a detective, and did you find that you needed to badger them to look at your case? It’s been a month for me and I don’t know if the cops will be any help…

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Yeah, the banks seem remarkably cavalier about all of this. To them, fraudulent accounts are a cost of doing business. They would rather write off 100 bad charges than possibly prevent one person from becoming their customer.

I think if you use smaller banks and/or credit unions, you are more likely to get good customer service. I have my checking and savings through a smaller bank, and they were great - the thieves were never able to access those accounts, even though they tried repeatedly. But the major banks involved (Bank of America, Wells Fargo and others) were wildly unhelpful.

The benefit is that no one can open a new line of credit using your identity. The downside is that if you want to do something like apply for a mortgage or a car loan, or get a store credit card somewhere, you have to un-freeze it. But you can download the apps for the credit bureaus and do that in seconds from your phone.

The credit bureaus don't want you to freeze your credit because they make money by making your information available to creditors. You are less valuable to them if your credit is frozen. To me, that is a good thing.

One interesting thing I learned while reporting this: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion are the major players, but there are more than 100 related bureaus that monitor your financial activity, including ones for checking accounts, payday loans, phone lines, utilities, etc. There is no way to completely "freeze" your financial identity with all of them at once. Frustrating!

Do you have any clients that are single women involved with married man? If so, do you any words of wisdom for them?

No!!!!! I really am still sad about that.

The credit bureaus. They are private businesses, but you can't opt out of participating if you want a bank account in America. They maintain tons of information about you but they don't seem to care at all about protecting that information, or helping you when the information they have is bad.

When I was finalizing reporting on this story in September, I looked through my credit reports with all three bureaus. All three of them still had incorrect information about me, like the thieves' addresses. I filed disputes with all three of them, and each of their sites was broken in some way. As a consumer, it doesn't feel like they're accountable to anyone.

ain’t that just the way…

Thank you, very insightful. If you did not you may want to post on supportforwaywards. As you may be able to pickup some clients from there. Most of them are working towards reconciliation. Your support may be beneficial to some. Keep up the great work.

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What is the benefit of freezing your credit? Is there any downside?

Thanks for the information. A few more questions: What is treatment like for someone who would classify as having serial affairs? How is sex addiction treated differently in someone who has PTSD from sex abuse? In cases of serial affairs, is there a recovery from this lifestyle or is it more focused around coping with the addiction and making safer choices?

Hey all, hope you are doing well. How exactly does the device identify that the cells are cancerous? I thought one of the main issues with cancer detection is that it is too difficult to distinguish from healthy cells in the quantities you find them in blood.

Did you ever get the free facial?

Advanced diagnostic techniques are useless. If they are not affordable and able to be used widely. Can you tell us about any measures you take to make your tests affordable or are you purely concerned with just the raw science and leaving the economics to others?

How did you first realise and is there anything you could have done, in hindsight, to have stopped it happening?

It doesn’t have an effect on rich people, so they don’t give a fuck.

absolutely wild that the FBI doesn’t track what is obviously a major kind of crime - why doesn’t the federal govt seem to care, and what could be done to incentivize more support there?

What should I be doing now as a parent to help protect my child's identity from ever being stolen?

Do you think the social security number system will go away/change at some point in the future?

Your bank seemed totally unhelpful. If your identity is stolen, is there a way to get your bank to do something that would help protect you?