I dentity stealing, Harvey Jordan’s dedicated profession, is an overcrowded activity, for a variety of reasons, all of them to the thief’s benefit and favour. It is a crime almost childishly – and mostly legally – easy to commit and therefore so prevalent that law enforcement agencies are overwhelmed, reducing the risk of detection and even less of arrest virtually to zero. People – supposedly clever, financially savvy people – appear to ignore every piece of advice and warning given by every financial organization or adviser. And those same financial organizations and advisers, despite that advice and those warnings, keep showering the head-in-the-sand birdbrains with ever more credit facilities and cash-gaining opportunities to be milked like a milch cow by ever ready suckling predators. Of whom Harvey Jordan judged himself the most adept, if not the most financially successful single operator.

Jordan could have doubled, maybe trebled, his income; even gained the ultimate position of being the most financially successful. But that would have required his masterminding and controlling a gang as so many others in the business did, multiplying their ID stealing – and profits – tenfold or more. Which did not attract or tempt Harvey Jordan in the slightest. If he ran a gang, its profit would obviously have to be divided by its number, which, while increasing his personal income by as much as another tax-free?2 million a year, correspondingly increased among one or more of that number the likelihood of error, incompetence or idiotic mistake, resulting in his being caught, despite the odds against that occurring remaining in his and their favour. Harvey Jordan knew he was good. What he didn’t know – and wasn’t interested in finding out – was how consistently good others were. Nor did he imagine others, for their part, would have the patience to operate with the care and attention to detail that he did and upon which he would have insisted in any extended partnership.