When I saw the headlines about hacker who made off with 130 million credit card numbers, I thought, "any thief that successful should be in government." Sure enough, Albert Gonzalez, the man in question, was a former government informant.
This story isn't anything to get too excited about. Yes, it's record-breaking, but that's what it takes to even get the feds to pay attention to identity theft. I've heard of cases of $50,000 worth of theft where no law enforcement agency was willing to even get up from their desks.
And if you did happen to own one of the 130,000,000 credit card accounts that was hacked, you're probably not going lose any money in all of this. This is a case of the authorities bragging about how they're out working to protect you from identity theft. That's only true if you're one of the millions of victims in one of these huge ID Theft rings. If you have a more personal case of identity theft, you're going to have a much harder time getting law enforcement interested.
Consider criminal identity theft. One of the worst kinds of identity theft, it involves a criminal providing your information to the police. Once they have your name listed as an alias for a known criminal, they'll never remove it from their records. Any time you get pulled over for any minor infraction after that, expect to wind up in handcuffs. Here's an article about criminal identity theft that offers some further resources.
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