Late last year I was the victim of identity theft (again).
Apparently this is not actually a crime!

Someone had attempted to take out two credit cards in my name.
One of the cards arrived at my house which is what triggered the investigation.

Contacting the credit card companies is not always as simple as it should be.
One of them had a fraud department that works outside of office hours.
The other had better fraud detection (they did not send me a card) but required me to spend half and hour on their phone system before I was able to talk to someone. You need to include a fraud path in your call centre messages.
Not all people calling have a customer number.

I have been using https://www.checkmyfile.com/ to perform cross agency checks.
Each of the credit card companies had made 2 hard searches against my account.

Hard searches are recorded as attempts to get credit.
Soft searches are simply other companies keeping an eye on your data.

These make it onto your credit file almost immediately.
Getting them removed is much slower.

To start with the credit agencies will only deal with the people who notified them.
It can take a company 2 weeks to make this call. It can take a credit agency 6 weeks to remove it from your file.
This does mean that any incident can require 3 months of fees to the checking service.

I am now 6 weeks from the event and I still have one credit search to remove.