[refurb]

How many criminals do you know well?

Sure, some criminals are people who make “mistakes”. It was an error in judgement, they feel remorse and won’t do it again.

But many criminals know what they are doing is hurting others, their attitude is “who cares”? It’s a risk they take, if they get caught it’s just “the cost of doing business”. These are people who take your sympathy and use it against you.

[vintermann]

Especially, when you do something that hurts people, there are ways to rationalize it. "If I didn't do it, someone else would", "they'll get it back from insurance or something, it won't inconvenience them too much", or just plain trying not to think about them at all.

But none of those options really work for the kind of identity theft where you take up loans in someone else's name, try to extort them with private information etc. The people who do that know perfectly well what kind of Kafkaesque hellhole they're sending their victims into. About the only thing they can do to justify themselves to themselves, is pick a victim they already hate for some reason.