If the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board isn’t immune from identity theft, who is?!

Michael Isikoff, Newsweek’s investigative correspondent, reports that Ben Bernanke “was one of hundreds of victims of an elaborate identity-fraud ring, headed by a convicted scam artist known as ‘Big Head,’ that stole more than $2.1 million from unsuspecting consumers and at least 10 financial institutions around the country.”

Last summer, just as he was dealing with the first rumblings of the financial crisis on Wall Street, Bernanke learned that a thief had swiped his wife’s purse — including the couple’s joint check book. Days later, someone started cashing checks on the Bernanke family bank account, the documents show.

According to Isikoff, “the theft of the Bernanke check book — never publicly revealed until now — soon became part of a wide-ranging (and previously underway) identity-theft investigation by the Secret Service and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.”