David Szwak barely had finished taking his bar exam when a law firm secretary asked him for help. Creditors and bill collectors were mercilessly harassing her parents, trying to collect $120,000 in bills run up by a credit identity thief.

A used-car salesman had stolen the couple's credit report by gaining computer access to the credit reporting agencies through his car dealership. The crook picked this couple because he had the same last name. He also collected the credit reports of other folks with the same name.

The thief then obtained a post office box and began filling out credit card applications. Among his purchases was a mobile home, delivered to a trailer park lot. In attempting to locate the thief, the creditors came across the secretary's parents instead.

The couple brought Szwak a box full of documents, including letters they had sent to lawmakers, credit reporting agencies and creditors. "They were trying to get this remedied and it wasn't working," Szwak remembers.

Szwak, of Shreveport, La., began writing his own letters to creditors on behalf of the couple, but he also was ignored. So he filed suit against the creditors and credit reporting agencies, 16 in all, in Jonesboro, Ark., federal court.

"A very short time later, once [the credit-reporting agencies] had a full understanding of what they had been doing, they settled the case for an enormous amount of money," Szwak reported. (Incidentally, the thief also was convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to two years of house arrest via electronic surveillance.)

Once the news media reported the case, other identity theft victims, including small business owners, scientists, military officers and even a CIA agent, began to contact Szwak, and a career was launched. He has handled hundreds of identity theft cases, typically involving tens of thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands, of dollars.

"We have been able to bring a number of these cases to court and get the victims' credit straightened out. These are people who pay their bills, people who work" who are the targets of other people who don't pay their bills, he says.

Szwak is no fan of credit bureaus or the credit industry. He denounces easy credit and the lax checking procedures of the stores and credit card companies that make identity theft a relatively easy crime to commit. "These people are absolutely rabid to give out credit," Szwak says. "There are trillions of dollars in consumer debt out there. It is out of control."

He is not any easier on the credit reporting agencies, which he says have absolutely no sympathy for the victims of identity fraud. "If you ever try to work out an error with the credit bureau, they will flat out tell you that regardless of what the law is, they will take the side of the subscriber (the provider of credit, such as a store or car dealer, who subscribes to their service) 100 percent of the time. They don't care how much proof you have. They will not do what they ask you to do. They are intransigent and they refuse to listen."

If this happens to you, Szwak says that you need to keep impeccable written records, including letters and telephone logs, of your communications with credit bureaus and creditors in your effort to clear up your credit report. If you are unable to resolve the situation satisfactorily, or if you are unable or unwilling to keep detailed records, Szwak says you should contact a lawyer.

"File a suit if it is not cleaned up," he says. That will usually get the attention of both the creditors and the credit agencies. If you have a good case, the result will be the correction of your credit report and a monetary settlement.

Szwak labels identity theft and the insensitivity and outright bungling of creditors and the credit agencies that accompany it as "financial terrorism." The victims are "nice people who are legitimately damaged. They want to straighten out the mess and get on with their lives."

Norman Magnuson, director of public affairs for the Washington, D.C.-based Associated Credit Bureaus, a trade association, says each of the three large credit reporting companies has procedures to help consumers purge their credit reports of fraudulent information.

Magnuson says the credit reporting industry issues 600 million credit reports a year on about 190 million Americans who have credit records. The system works the vast majority of the time, and "the American public is enamored with the use of credit and access to credit right now."

"There are a lot of parts to this process," Magnuson adds. "It is patently unfair to lay the blame solely with the credit agencies. What about law enforcement, the creditors and the consumers?"

"We all have to be part of the solution," he said.