Debt, Lies, and Other Things Our Parents Leave Us

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Identity theft is something many of us are familiar with, but we have a specific image of what this looks like – our data being stolen online, or someone getting a hold of our social security number. But almost a third of identity theft crimes are committed by a family member. This episode tells the story of two people who experienced financial abuse at the hands of their parents.

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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.


Nora: I’m Nora McInerny, and “This is Terrible, Thanks for Asking.” 

 

Claire: And I’m Claire McInerny. I’m a producer here on the show, and … uh, yeah, I’m related to Nora. We are second cousins, I guess?

 

Nora: Yes. Your dad is my cousin. Your grandpa is my uncle?

 

Claire: Somehow, somewhere in there, we are related.

 

Nora: Aside from our family tree, what are we talking about today, Claire?

 

Claire: So I want to talk to you about identity theft. And so first off I want you to kind of tell me: When you think of identity theft, what are the things that pop into mind for you?

 

Nora: I think about the phishing scam from Geek Squad that I absolutely fell for. 100 percent. I was like oh my gosh I better open this invoice. I’ve never once used Geek Squad but they sent me an invoice. I should open it up. Let me click these links. Let me put in my information. I think about people going through your garbage, grabbing your bank statements. I think about the dark web.

 

Claire: The deep dark web. And that’s what I’ve always thought too. I too fell for a scam once. My gmail was hacked … and I let them right in!

 

Nora: Come on in! Come on in! What else would you like to know? My mother’s maiden name?

 

Claire: I have grown, though. I now have every single password that is just gobbledygook and I can’t remember them all, but … I was told that was safer. So anyway. That is the kind of identity theft I think me and you and lots of other people think of when we think of this crime, because that’s kind of what we’re always taught to prevent. You know, we’re always talking about safe online security. I remember when I was younger, my parents were always shredding papers because they were like, “We don’t want someone to go through the garbage and get our information.”

 

Nora: My brother’s identity got stolen a few years ago. I don’t even think he knows how it happened but it really ruined his life there for a while. And maybe still. And it was a stranger. IT was a total complete stranger who did it, and it was really, really disturbing, and I still think we don’t know how it happened.

 

Claire: So I’m gonna ask you a second question: Besides your own social security number – I’m going to assume you know it; don’t tell me if I’m wrong – what other social security numbers do you have memorized or could you find within like, five minutes if I asked you to?

 

Nora: OH! I know Matthew’s social security number by heart. I know one of our children’s social security numbers by heart. I know all of their birth dates, obviously. I ‘m a good person. So I know their birth dates. Yes. I know where Matthew was born, his mother’s maiden name, his mom’s birthday, his dad’s birthday. Yeah, I think I know … I don’t want to say everything, but I know all of the important numbers for the people who live in this house. 

 

Claire: Yep! And that is what we’re gonna talk about today. Because you, as a parent and a spouse, are in the position a lot of people are in, where you have access to that data, and I’m sure you only use it when you guys are signing the kids up for school or you and Matthew are making some sort of purchase. But you do have their identifies in your brain, or you have those documents handy.

 

Nora: I actually don’t even have my own passport in my possession – Matthew has them all. Matthew has all of our passports. That’s interesting.

 

Claire: Yeah! And so I bring that up because the interviews I did for today’s show are about identity theft, but a kind that feels a lot more sinister to me than what you and I were talking about at first – the stranger stealing our stuff online. The people I talked to had their identities stolen by close family members. 

 

Claire: So the first person we spoke with was Amber Craft. She’s 28, and she grew up in Florida. 

Amber Craft: Money was never abundant. We … I remember asking to go somewhere with friends, and if I could go, my dad would hardly ever have any money to send with me to do the activity. And so luckily, I had some friends whose parents would compensate for that and help me participate in a lot of the things that my friends were getting to do. But on the off chance that I ever was sent somewhere with money, I remember, like, not knowing how to use it. I would blow it all on the very first thing I had the opportunity to spend it on, because that’s what I’d seen my parents do. We never had money left over from one week to the next. There was never, like, growth in the … in the bank account. It was always just enough money to pay for all the things we need to live from day to day. 

Claire: So living paycheck to paycheck was the general vibe in Amber’s family. But in the early 2000s, her parents were able to get multiple home loans, and they started buying property in Florida. And this was absolutely the beginning of what would lead to the housing market crash in 2008. 

 

Amber Craft: My parents got involved in buying houses and flipping some, renting some out. And for the first time ever, we had, like, some decent amount of money. I remember going out to a steakhouse for the first time and having, like, a restaurant steak meal. And it was just awesome. And then that became like a regular thing. We would go pretty frequently out to eat. And that wasn’t something I had been used to before that.

Claire: This financial security, and the steak dinners that came with it, only lasted a year. Amber’s not quite sure what happened, but her parents defaulted on these loans, and that put the family in financial ruins. 

Amber Craft: Which led to my parents making some bad choices against one another. They both had affairs. They both got wrapped up in drug addictions. And then they got divorced.

Claire: Her mom was addicted to crack and lived with an abusive boyfriend, and so after the divorce, she wasn’t allowed to be alone with Amber or her sister. The arrangement they had was a third party facilitator would meet Amber, her sister, and Amber’s mom at a church in their neighborhood.

Amber Craft: Most of the time she wouldn’t show up. When she did, it was just a quick visit and then she would leave. There was one time – and this is the reason that the visitation actually stopped – I had decided that I didn’t want to see my mom anymore because of just the way she had treated me, the way she treated my sister. And I went into the church and left the visitation area before she got there. And somehow she found me. And I ran into this bathroom, and she followed me in there and blocked the door and essentially told me, if I don’t want to visit with her, then I should just get emancipated. I didn’t even know what it meant when she said it. And I remember asking my dad what it meant, and he was livid. And he finally explained it to me. But I remember just being like … I’ve always felt like she didn’t really care that much about us. And when she said that, it was kind of just confirmation that she didn’t want to be in our lives. And she had finally made that pretty clear.

Nora: Oh. That’s so hard to hear. That’s so hard to hear as a parent. That’s so hard to hear as a former child. ANd also, as a mom, I really do always want to believe the best in other parents, too, and believe that they want to do their best and that they do love their children, and addiction is so sinister and it’s such a specific kind of suffering. I’m not excusing this, but it’s all just really painful to know.

Claire: Totally. Addiction brings out the worst in people. And I share that story just to illustrate that that’s how Amber felt too. The relationship she had with her mom was really fraught and really painful for a lot of her life. So she’s a kid, and it’s not like she understands the complexities of addiction, like you and I just recognized. She just knows that her mom is unreliable and irresponsible, and as much as she might want to, she can’t trust her. And here’s another story Amber told me that makes me so mad for baby Amber. 

Amber Craft: My grandpa had just sent my mom through this rehab program, and she had completed it, and she was supposedly doing really well. So my grandpa sent my mom with some money for our birthdays. Or birthdays are a day apart. And we were going to go to Disneyworld for my sister’s fifth birthday. It was her first experience at anything like that, and we were so excited for it. My mom came to our house, and we were going to go the next day, so she was going to stay with us. The next day we would drive to Disney. It was only like a two-hour drive. And the next day, we woke up, getting in, we’re ready to go, and my mom had left in the night with the money that my grandpa sent for our birthdays.

Nora: Ohhhh. So what’s going on with her dad at this point? 

Claire: So he had full custody of both girls. They lived in a single-wide trailer together, and he did his best to make sure there were groceries and other necessities for the two girls. But money was still really, really tight for him, because he couldn’t work much because of an injury. 

Amber Craft: He was battling with major back pain from years working construction, which led to … the drug addictions of choice for him was an opioid addiction. He was doctor shopping for a while and selling additional pills. I don’t know where money came from other than selling pills, because for most of this time he wasn’t doing any, like, actual job outside of the house.

Claire: Like Amber remembers people coming to their trailer, going back into her dad’s room, and leaving a few minutes later. As a kid, she didn’t understand what was happening, but now she knows they were buying the drugs her dad got from doctors. And in addition to the back pain, her Dad had a lot of other health issues and was sick for most of Amber’s life. And he ended up dying when she was 18. And this is when the money drama really ramps up for Amber. 

Amber Craft: I was the next of kin for my dad’s estate, and I put “estate” in big, fat quotation marks, because it was some debt and a broken-down car and all of the junk that we had accumulated in our house was my dad’s estate. There was no money for a funeral or even a cremation. So the funeral director helped me apply for what they call an indigent cremation. So the county or the state has funds to pay for a cremation for people who have no money. And so we ended up doing that with my dad’s body.

Claire: After her dad dies, Amber’s younger sister moves in with their mom, which Amber is not happy about … but she can’t really do much as an 18-year-old. 

Nora: So, she’s 18. She loses her dad, and she’s in charge of an estate, and she’s not even old enough to get a drink or get a rental car or a hotel room, and that’s such a huge foundational loss for anybody, but I also think for her, because her dad is her safe place in this world, so … where does she go from here? 

Claire: Her younger sister is still a kid and has to live with an adult, so she’s with her mom. Amber decides to go to college in Orlando, and she really gets it together. She gets a college degree! She meets a great guy, and they get engaged and move in together after graduation. And then … Amber’s mom dies. She had cancer, which Amber knew about, but her mom was never really open about how bad it was. So it did come as a surprise. And Amber’s little sister is 16, and Amber and her fiance invite her to come live with them. 

Nora: This is horrible but that’s also so sweet. And I have high hopes for the three of them … but I also have to assume this is not going to end well. 

Claire: And it is sweet! Like we heard earlier, Amber was upset that her sister couldn’t live with her when she was younger, so she’s happy she can bring her in now. But Amber and her husband are so young. They’ve just graduated college. They’re broke. They’re barely making ends meet. And it’s tight, adding a 16-year-old girl to the mix. But they’re doing it. And they’re happy to do it. Amber is giving her sister the stability she didn’t have at her age.  But then…

Amber Craft: It started with phone calls from collections companies.

Nora: Oh, no. 

Claire: I know. We’ll be right back. 

Nora: We’re back. Okay, Claire, Amber is 23 years old, living on her own with her fiance and little sister, and then out of the blue she starts getting calls from collections agencies. What are they saying?

 

Claire: Well at first, she’s really confused. Because at 23, she had never checked her credit. All of the bills in her college apartment were under her roommate’s name. She was never really taught financial basics like checking credit, so she had no idea what was going on with her report. When she’s talking to these collection agencies, they are saying she has outstanding debts that she didn’t know about.

Amber Craft: They were for accounts, Florida Power and Light, which is the utilities company in South Florida, where I grew up. And they were telling me about the address that was on the account, and it was an address that my mom lived at for a long time. And I told them, like, “I was a kid, like … I yeah, I know that address. I should be associated with that address at some point, I’m sure. But I didn’t make this account. Like, if you look at the date when it started, I would have been a minor. I don’t know how you even opened this account.”

Claire: The collections people are saying there are unpaid electric bills in Amber’s name, from her childhood home. And almost immediately, Amber knew what happened.

Amber Craft: I knew immediately that it … that it had to have been my mom, because she was always manipulating situations and being shady about things. And also, when they told me the address that the power bill was tied to, I knew that that was somewhere that my mom had lived a few years prior. But I was really ashamed of it at first. I didn’t even want to tell my husband about the situation. And I kind of let it go. Like I hid from it for a while. It felt like too big of a problem, something that was like, I’m not grown up enough to know how to handle this. So when the calls would come, for quite some time, a lot of the time I wouldn’t answer. Eventually, the times that I did answer, I would get really frustrated, and I usually wasn’t as nice to those … the people who were calling as I probably should have been. 

Nora: Well …yeah. As a general rule, I think you should be nice to every single customer service person, and I also think that people who work in collections know that they aren’t exactly making a friendly phone call. This is not a call anyone looks forward to receiving.

Claire: Right. And it takes a while for Amber to actually face things. One day, she answers the phone and she asks: What could I even do about this account? She tells them it’s not hers, her mom opened it…and her mom is dead.

Nora: And I’m sure they totally believed her and were like, “Absolutely. Of course, your dead mom opened this account in your name. So sorry to bother you. We’ll get this taken care of. Take it off your list of worries.”

Claire: Yeah, the red tape bureaucratic nightmare does not happen. Don’t worry, end of story!

Nora: “That’s on us! Don’t worry! We got it! Sorry to bother you.”

Claire: No! In fact, they say, “Well, if you think this was a crime, even if the person is dead, we need a police report.” So Amber goes down to the police station and files a police report against her dead mother.

Amber Craft: I remember explaining to the officer that this account was several hundred dollars and it was from when I was a kid, and my mom’s dead. So … I don’t know what to do. They told me I need a police report. So they filed this police report, and they kind of brushed me off. But I got the document I needed and I was able to submit that to this one bill collections agency. And that one was cleared.

Claire: That wasn’t the only account that Amber’s mom had opened in her daughter’s name. The calls keep coming and coming and coming, because there’s at least half a dozen accounts that have gone to collections. Accounts in Ambers name … but for addresses her mom lived in years ago.

 

Nora: And every account probably means she has to go back to the police department and start the process all over again?

 

Claire: That is correct.

Amber Craft: I’ve been to the Kissimmee Police Department so many times getting these same police reports and submitting them to collections agencies. And I know that you’re supposed to be able to pull your credit history and see all of the negative accounts in your name. And I do that. I look at it. And I don’t find them. Everything that has shown up on there has been taken care of. But then these new ones just keep coming and coming. I don’t know how it’s happening. I don’t understand where additional accounts are coming from, why they’re not already showing up on my credit history, if they’re already in collections, or if the companies who are sending these bills to collections are just working through a backlog or something. It just seems weird that multiple companies have been, first of all, accepting a child’s Social Security number, and second, sending bills almost a decade after. The police have said things like, “Because they’re dead, they won’t be committing any more fraud against you.” They’ve explained the whole identity theft process, and if I was worried that new accounts were going to be created in my name, they could help me lock my Social Security number or something like that. But in this case, all of the crime has already happened. There’s no threat of more crime, more accounts to be opened. But nobody’s given me any advice on how to find the accounts that are already negative in my name.

Nora: It’s not surprising. I don’t think anyone’s expecting a police department to offer psychological care and sit Amber down and be like, “I’m so sorry this happened to you. Your mother should’ve never done this.” It’s so hard to hear, even secondhand, that the threat is technically gone, right? Her mother has died. But she still has to reckon with the fact that a person who is meant to protect you, is meant to nurture you, not only failed her in those basic aspects when she was growing up, but also put her in this horrible position as a very recent adult.  

Claire: Yeah! And the emotional side of this, I can’t even fathom. But on top of that, she is in the middle of a bureaucratic mess, because as he said, the cops don’t really have a plan for this. She doesn’t know how many accounts are still out there. 

Nora: yeah. It’s always, like, whenever something emotionally disastrous happens, you can almost always count on paperwork being involved, which is really … it’s injury to insult, if I have to say. It’s not insult to injury. It’s injury to insult. Paperwork on top of this? Really? Now I have to fill out some forms? Are you kidding me?  

Claire: Also, this wasn’t the end of the surprises. As all of these collection calls were coming in, Amber realized it wasn’t just her mom that stole her identity. 

Amber Craft: I remember checking the mail as a kid, living with my dad, and seeing bills come in with my name on them. And I would ask my dad about them, and he would kind of blow them off. And so … I didn’t know any better, so I just trusted him. And after those first collections came through that were tied to my mom’s address, I got another one that I ended up tracking down to be tied to my dad’s address. This bill, I believe, to be the one– the account that was active when my dad died, so I want to trust and believe that my dad didn’t actually run up a lot of debt in my name. This bill was smaller. I think it just was unpaid because he died, and I didn’t know it existed. But still, he had opened the account in my name.

Nora: Her dad?!

Claire: I know. I know. And in our interviews with Amber, she very much wants to give her dad the benefit of the doubt, because he wasn’t a serial manipulator or scammer like her mom. But he did make the same choice. 

Nora: So what are we talking about? What’s a round number to go with these old debts that Amber has been stuck with?

Claire: It’s been around two thousand dollars at this point, because we were talking about utility bills. That was a lot for her in her early 20s. But now, the problem is: It’s messed up her credit, and it’s been this huge hassle.  

Amber Craft: I feel like I’ve been digging myself out of this big hole of bad credit, and I’ve made poor financial decisions that have affected it, too. But I think that it’s so much worse because of the fraud. Whenever I submit the police report and get an account wiped away, that does fix a little bit of my credit. I feel like it’s one step forward and two steps back. Every time I make a good decision, I am faced with another challenge that is not even my fault that I have to figure out how to solve. You’re supposed to be able to trust your parents to hold that information and help you make good decisions. But if you’re born into a family of untrustworthy people, then that can easily be abused.

Nora: So I mentioned that my brother had his identity stolen. I actually know many people who have gotten their identities stolen and the logistics are such a nightmare. And what Amber exis going through is compounded by the fact that this is a form of financial abuse, right? When she was a minor, both of her parents used her info to help themselves, and it’s now harming her. 

Claire: When I was working on this episode I told a friend who is a social worker about it and she said she actually sees this a lot with low-income families, kind of as an act of financial desperation. And that’s kind of how Amber views what her dad did, is he needed the help to get utilities for their home, and that’s one side of this.

Nora: Oh god, okay, and when you put it that way, I’m not excusing what Amber’s parents did. I am not. It’s a huge betrayal. But also … it is so hard to be poor in America. Why would you need credit of any kind to get necessities like power? Like power? That is a very basic human right. And as easy as it would be – or is – to judge this, I’ve also never been in a position where I had to choose between having electricity or using (stealing) my kid’s social security number to GET that electricity. And also, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s super harmful to the kid who never had a say in this. 

Claire: Right. And that’s kind of why Amber thinks, even though her mom and dad made the same choice, her dad’s in a different boat, because the debt wasn’t as high on the account he opened in her name. She thinks he was paying it while he was still alive because he didn’t want to burden her. I mentioned I talked to a friend who said she saw this alot. We talked to Amber. As I was working on this story, I began to wonder how common is this? Like, are Amber’s mom and dad – who might’ve had different intentions – are either of them the rule or the outlier when it comes to stealing the identity from their children?

Nora: When we come back, we hear from someone who can give us a little more context on financial abuse and identity theft among family members. 

 

Nora: When I first heard Amber’s story, I was really shocked. Screwing your kids over financially by stealing their identity feels so sinister. But as Amber mentioned when talking about her dad using her social security number, people get desperate! Her dad was in a bad spot financially. I’m not excusing it at all, but he was probably paying the bills in her name because his credit was bad. And as we were working on this episode, we wanted to learn more about familial identity theft – because, frankly, a lot of us hadn’t heard about it before. 

Axton: There is a statistic out there that I cite pretty regularly. It’s estimated that 30% of all identity theft victims have their identity stolen by a family member.

Nora: This is Axton Betz-Hamilton, a professor of consumer affairs at South Dakota State University, and one of the very few researchers focusing on familial identity theft. 

Axton: We see so much in the popular press about data breaches and, you know, secure your identity online, and blah, blah, blah. And that’s, that’s important, don’t get me wrong. But what we’re not talking about as much is that 30% of people who have their identity stolen by a family member.

Nora: Axton has committed her entire academic career, from undergrad, through her doctoral program, to her research now, studying identity theft. 

Axton: So research in this area is really challenging to conduct because, people aren’t talking about it. You know, there’s a sense of shame and stigma and trauma.

Nora: Axton is so diligent in her work, despite it being difficult to do, because she’s also trying to understand her own personal experience. 

Axton: What I understood about identity theft as a child was that there was some awful person out there who had stolen our Social Security number, our date of birth, our address, you know, all of our personal information. And we’re using that to do us harm.

Nora: This identity theft led to a slew of financial problems for the family throughout Axton’s childhood. Their phone and electricity services were turned off. Someone was stealing their mail, so they had to constantly get new PO Boxes. A sheriff even showed up at their house to arrest her mom because someone was writing bad checks at Walmart attached to a bank account in her name. Axton’s dad convinced the sheriff it wasn’t his wife, but the identity thief who was doing it. 

 

Nora: Axton’s mom was an accountant, so naturally she handled the family’s finances. Axton remembers watching her dad spend hours on the phone with utility companies, the post office, the police, trying to sort this all out. And eventually, both her parents became incredibly distrustful of anyone. The family became reclusive, because they felt the identity thief was someone close to them, but they didn’t know who. This chaotic and fearful dynamic plagued Axton’s entire adolescence.

 

Axton: So I went to college two hours away from home, in part to get away from the identity theft. I thought the identity thief couldn’t follow me to college. And boy, I was wrong about that. So my first year of college, I lived in the residence halls, you know, didn’t have utility bills or anything like that. And I moved off campus in my sophomore year, and I called the electric company to establish service at my little, humble apartment. And they told me the day and time that the service would be switched over to my name. And then a few days later, I received a letter in the mail from the electric company that said, “Due to your credit score, we need a $100 deposit to secure your electric service.” And there was a 1-800 number to call at the bottom of the letter to get a copy of my credit report. And I did, just out of curiosity, because I didn’t know what a credit report was, and I wanted to see what this unknown entity was keeping on me. And about six weeks later, this large manila envelope arrived in the mail. You know, I walked over to the mailbox with dread, saw it was from the credit reporting agency, and it was really thick. It was a really thick envelope. And I thought, “Credit reports must be really hard to read. They must come with a lot of instructions and disclosures.” But I went inside, opened the manila envelope and realized very quickly that credit reports are not difficult to read. They don’t come with a lot of instructions and disclosures, but rather mine was ten pages long and full of fraudulent credit card account entries and associated collection agency entries that dated back to the time that my parents’ identities had been stolen eight years earlier. So it could be assumed that the individual responsible for their identity theft was also responsible for my identity theft.

 

Nora: Now, Axton herself is a victim of identity theft. As she’s trying to live on her own for the first time, the cable and phone companies make her jump through hoops just to get service. When she buys her first car, the loan she gets has an 18 percent interest rate! Her first credit card charged more than 20 percent interest, all because her credit was trashed by some stranger when she was a kid. This is when she became interested in studying identity theft. If she couldn’t figure out who was doing this to her, maybe understanding the crime itself would make her feel better. So for the next 12 years, Axton starts her academic career with identity theft at the center of her research. 

 

Axton: Six months after I graduated with my Ph.D., my mom passed away from cancer, and 13 days after that, my dad called me. And he was pretty irate with me for running a credit card over-limit in 2001. And I asked Dad what credit card it was, and he told me and I said, “Dad, that was one of the credit cards that was taken out in my name as part of the identity theft.” And I said, “Where did you find that?” He said, “It’s out here in a file box of your mom’s in a file folder with your birth certificate.” And my blood ran cold. Because I had my birth certificate. And what logical reason would my birth certificate and a credit card statement that was fraudulent … what logical reason is there for those two things to be in the same file? 

 

Nora: In one phone call, Axton’s entire perception of her life shattered. She immediately heads back to her parents’ house to help her dad go through the rest of her mom’s files and try to find some answers.

Axton: From there, we found just more and more and more documentation that supported that her identity was never stolen. So that was a story that she made up and orchestrated quite well over a 20-year period. So when she ruined her own credit, she moved on to my dad’s, and then when she ruined his credit, she moved on to mine. Then once she realized she didn’t have total control over me and who I talked to and what I did two hours away, she ended up going back to Dad’s credit – because there are some things that we found like 2007, 2008 that were in his name that were fraudulent. And then when she ruined his credit, she moved on to my grandfather’s identity. Those 13 days between the time that Mom passed away and we found out that she was the person responsible for the identity theft, I do think Dad and I were going through a normal grieving process. But once we found out that Mom was the offender, the grief process stopped for both of us. And the best way I can describe it is: How can you grieve for someone that you clearly didn’t know? And I’m not sure that anyone really knew who my mother was.

Nora: Amber believes her dad was using her social security number because he was in a bad financial spot. But it didn’t seem like Axton’s mom and Amber’s mom had any plan to pay these bills back. They allowed their actions to have lifelong consequences for their kids. 

 

Nora: So between these three parents, there’s two ways to look at why they did it. And we asked Axton, as a researcher, which is more common.

 

Axton: Based on the more recent research I’ve done, I don’t think it’s because people who know you do this because they’re in a bad financial spot and they’re desperate. There’s some of that. But I think the majority, it’s tied to mental health over and over again. But when I interview victims, I ask them about their experiences with the offender. And, you know, again, some of them have said, you know, the offender had a diagnosed personality disorder, or they behaved in a way that is consistent with narcissism. So there’s more work to be done there to tease out what’s going on in those cases.

 

Nora: As she mentioned earlier, it’s hard to find people to participate in her research, so Axton doesn’t get very large sample sizes. She can’t make generalizations, but over and over she’s hearing from victims that their parents – the people who stole from them – also acted like her mom. They had narcissistic qualities and thrived on secrets. They lied and hurt those close to them. Axton has made the choice to look at her pain through an academic lens.

 

Axton: And so rather than getting bogged down in the emotions, it’s like, okay, what I’ve got in front of me is data. “I have to gather the data, I have to analyze the data. I have to figure out what was going on with my mom. I need, you know, objective sources of data.” And then, that’s just where my brain goes. So I don’t know that I’ve really emotionally processed as much as I have kind of, like, split it off and I just sort of treat it as a research problem that needs to be analyzed.

 

Nora: Axton is trying to learn from her mom’s crime so she can help others. She didn’t pick up on her mom’s habits because she didn’t even know that her mom was doing this. 

 

Nora: But Amber, who we heard about at the beginning of this episode, was different. When she reflects on her early 20s, when she was living on her own for the first time, she sees how she was acting very similar to her parents when it came to money. 

Amber Craft: Some of those bad habits were just kind of natural to me. I didn’t know how to deal with money, and I would, again, spend it pretty much as soon as I got it, because that’s how I saw adults using their money. So I took out student loans that helped pay for my room and board. And then I also took up two different part-time jobs while I was in college. And I would use that just frivolously, like I would spend the money as it came in on activities that all my other friends were doing or new clothes or eating out or whatever I wanted to spend it on. So there was … there were no savings.

Nora: There’s a lot we can inherit from our parents, like it or not. We can’t change all of it: Your eyes are your eyes, your height is your height … but there are some inheritances we don’t have to claim. It isn’t easy to shrug off the things that have been foisted upon us without our consent. It’s not fair to have to pay for the sins of your parents. It’s not easy to dig yourself out of a hole, physically, metaphorically, or financially. Especially not a hole that you were pushed into. 

Nora: Slowly, Amber is starting to change her relationship with money. She and her husband have worked on budgeting and have taken money management courses. She’s improved her credit and paid off debt. 

Amber Craft: But I also want to create a better future for myself than what my childhood was like. And I was just terrified that I was never going to get away from these debts. As they’ve continued to come, though, and I’m starting to understand the process a little bit more, I’m less worried about, like, my future.

Nora: If you are a victim of identity theft, no matter what kind, one resource you should seek out is the Identity Theft Resource Center. It’s free to call them, and they will walk you through all of the steps to try to take your identity back. 

 

Nora: Special thanks to Amber for sharing her story. And thank you to Axton Betz-Hamilton for sharing her story and her research with us. Axton also wrote a memoir, it is so good. It’s called “The Less People Know About Us.” We will obviously link to it in our show notes.

 

Nora: This has been “Terrible, Thanks for Asking.” Im Nora McInerny and the rest of our team is … Claire McInerny! Say hello! Claire McInerny might not be here anymore.

 

Claire: I was muted! I was muted. But I’m here. Hello.

 

Nora: She’s here! Claire McInerny, Jordan Turgeon, Marcel Malakebu, Megan Palmer, Larissa Witcher, and Eugene Kidd. 

 

We are an independent production. We are no longer a part of a giant media conglomerate, so thank you so much for being here. Everything that you do, listening to this episode helps our show. Sharing it with someone helps our show. Rating and reviewing it wherever you listen helps our show. If you want to support our show financially, no obligation, literally whatever, you can go to TTFA.org/Premium. You can get ad-free episodes. You can get some bonus content that we work super hard on. We also have a bunch of stuff linked. It’s all linked in the notes. Jordan’s been working really hard to put together a Substack for like, episode discussions, other stuff, and we are also going on tour again and we’re gonna just keep doing that throughout the year, so check the website for your cities and see where we’re going. 

Identity theft is something many of us are familiar with, but we have a specific image of what this looks like – our data being stolen online, or someone getting a hold of our social security number. But almost a third of identity theft crimes are committed by a family member. This episode tells the story of two people who experienced financial abuse at the hands of their parents.

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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.


Nora: I’m Nora McInerny, and “This is Terrible, Thanks for Asking.” 

 

Claire: And I’m Claire McInerny. I’m a producer here on the show, and … uh, yeah, I’m related to Nora. We are second cousins, I guess?

 

Nora: Yes. Your dad is my cousin. Your grandpa is my uncle?

 

Claire: Somehow, somewhere in there, we are related.

 

Nora: Aside from our family tree, what are we talking about today, Claire?

 

Claire: So I want to talk to you about identity theft. And so first off I want you to kind of tell me: When you think of identity theft, what are the things that pop into mind for you?

 

Nora: I think about the phishing scam from Geek Squad that I absolutely fell for. 100 percent. I was like oh my gosh I better open this invoice. I’ve never once used Geek Squad but they sent me an invoice. I should open it up. Let me click these links. Let me put in my information. I think about people going through your garbage, grabbing your bank statements. I think about the dark web.

 

Claire: The deep dark web. And that’s what I’ve always thought too. I too fell for a scam once. My gmail was hacked … and I let them right in!

 

Nora: Come on in! Come on in! What else would you like to know? My mother’s maiden name?

 

Claire: I have grown, though. I now have every single password that is just gobbledygook and I can’t remember them all, but … I was told that was safer. So anyway. That is the kind of identity theft I think me and you and lots of other people think of when we think of this crime, because that’s kind of what we’re always taught to prevent. You know, we’re always talking about safe online security. I remember when I was younger, my parents were always shredding papers because they were like, “We don’t want someone to go through the garbage and get our information.”

 

Nora: My brother’s identity got stolen a few years ago. I don’t even think he knows how it happened but it really ruined his life there for a while. And maybe still. And it was a stranger. IT was a total complete stranger who did it, and it was really, really disturbing, and I still think we don’t know how it happened.

 

Claire: So I’m gonna ask you a second question: Besides your own social security number – I’m going to assume you know it; don’t tell me if I’m wrong – what other social security numbers do you have memorized or could you find within like, five minutes if I asked you to?

 

Nora: OH! I know Matthew’s social security number by heart. I know one of our children’s social security numbers by heart. I know all of their birth dates, obviously. I ‘m a good person. So I know their birth dates. Yes. I know where Matthew was born, his mother’s maiden name, his mom’s birthday, his dad’s birthday. Yeah, I think I know … I don’t want to say everything, but I know all of the important numbers for the people who live in this house. 

 

Claire: Yep! And that is what we’re gonna talk about today. Because you, as a parent and a spouse, are in the position a lot of people are in, where you have access to that data, and I’m sure you only use it when you guys are signing the kids up for school or you and Matthew are making some sort of purchase. But you do have their identifies in your brain, or you have those documents handy.

 

Nora: I actually don’t even have my own passport in my possession – Matthew has them all. Matthew has all of our passports. That’s interesting.

 

Claire: Yeah! And so I bring that up because the interviews I did for today’s show are about identity theft, but a kind that feels a lot more sinister to me than what you and I were talking about at first – the stranger stealing our stuff online. The people I talked to had their identities stolen by close family members. 

 

Claire: So the first person we spoke with was Amber Craft. She’s 28, and she grew up in Florida. 

Amber Craft: Money was never abundant. We … I remember asking to go somewhere with friends, and if I could go, my dad would hardly ever have any money to send with me to do the activity. And so luckily, I had some friends whose parents would compensate for that and help me participate in a lot of the things that my friends were getting to do. But on the off chance that I ever was sent somewhere with money, I remember, like, not knowing how to use it. I would blow it all on the very first thing I had the opportunity to spend it on, because that’s what I’d seen my parents do. We never had money left over from one week to the next. There was never, like, growth in the … in the bank account. It was always just enough money to pay for all the things we need to live from day to day. 

Claire: So living paycheck to paycheck was the general vibe in Amber’s family. But in the early 2000s, her parents were able to get multiple home loans, and they started buying property in Florida. And this was absolutely the beginning of what would lead to the housing market crash in 2008. 

 

Amber Craft: My parents got involved in buying houses and flipping some, renting some out. And for the first time ever, we had, like, some decent amount of money. I remember going out to a steakhouse for the first time and having, like, a restaurant steak meal. And it was just awesome. And then that became like a regular thing. We would go pretty frequently out to eat. And that wasn’t something I had been used to before that.

Claire: This financial security, and the steak dinners that came with it, only lasted a year. Amber’s not quite sure what happened, but her parents defaulted on these loans, and that put the family in financial ruins. 

Amber Craft: Which led to my parents making some bad choices against one another. They both had affairs. They both got wrapped up in drug addictions. And then they got divorced.

Claire: Her mom was addicted to crack and lived with an abusive boyfriend, and so after the divorce, she wasn’t allowed to be alone with Amber or her sister. The arrangement they had was a third party facilitator would meet Amber, her sister, and Amber’s mom at a church in their neighborhood.

Amber Craft: Most of the time she wouldn’t show up. When she did, it was just a quick visit and then she would leave. There was one time – and this is the reason that the visitation actually stopped – I had decided that I didn’t want to see my mom anymore because of just the way she had treated me, the way she treated my sister. And I went into the church and left the visitation area before she got there. And somehow she found me. And I ran into this bathroom, and she followed me in there and blocked the door and essentially told me, if I don’t want to visit with her, then I should just get emancipated. I didn’t even know what it meant when she said it. And I remember asking my dad what it meant, and he was livid. And he finally explained it to me. But I remember just being like … I’ve always felt like she didn’t really care that much about us. And when she said that, it was kind of just confirmation that she didn’t want to be in our lives. And she had finally made that pretty clear.

Nora: Oh. That’s so hard to hear. That’s so hard to hear as a parent. That’s so hard to hear as a former child. ANd also, as a mom, I really do always want to believe the best in other parents, too, and believe that they want to do their best and that they do love their children, and addiction is so sinister and it’s such a specific kind of suffering. I’m not excusing this, but it’s all just really painful to know.

Claire: Totally. Addiction brings out the worst in people. And I share that story just to illustrate that that’s how Amber felt too. The relationship she had with her mom was really fraught and really painful for a lot of her life. So she’s a kid, and it’s not like she understands the complexities of addiction, like you and I just recognized. She just knows that her mom is unreliable and irresponsible, and as much as she might want to, she can’t trust her. And here’s another story Amber told me that makes me so mad for baby Amber. 

Amber Craft: My grandpa had just sent my mom through this rehab program, and she had completed it, and she was supposedly doing really well. So my grandpa sent my mom with some money for our birthdays. Or birthdays are a day apart. And we were going to go to Disneyworld for my sister’s fifth birthday. It was her first experience at anything like that, and we were so excited for it. My mom came to our house, and we were going to go the next day, so she was going to stay with us. The next day we would drive to Disney. It was only like a two-hour drive. And the next day, we woke up, getting in, we’re ready to go, and my mom had left in the night with the money that my grandpa sent for our birthdays.

Nora: Ohhhh. So what’s going on with her dad at this point? 

Claire: So he had full custody of both girls. They lived in a single-wide trailer together, and he did his best to make sure there were groceries and other necessities for the two girls. But money was still really, really tight for him, because he couldn’t work much because of an injury. 

Amber Craft: He was battling with major back pain from years working construction, which led to … the drug addictions of choice for him was an opioid addiction. He was doctor shopping for a while and selling additional pills. I don’t know where money came from other than selling pills, because for most of this time he wasn’t doing any, like, actual job outside of the house.

Claire: Like Amber remembers people coming to their trailer, going back into her dad’s room, and leaving a few minutes later. As a kid, she didn’t understand what was happening, but now she knows they were buying the drugs her dad got from doctors. And in addition to the back pain, her Dad had a lot of other health issues and was sick for most of Amber’s life. And he ended up dying when she was 18. And this is when the money drama really ramps up for Amber. 

Amber Craft: I was the next of kin for my dad’s estate, and I put “estate” in big, fat quotation marks, because it was some debt and a broken-down car and all of the junk that we had accumulated in our house was my dad’s estate. There was no money for a funeral or even a cremation. So the funeral director helped me apply for what they call an indigent cremation. So the county or the state has funds to pay for a cremation for people who have no money. And so we ended up doing that with my dad’s body.

Claire: After her dad dies, Amber’s younger sister moves in with their mom, which Amber is not happy about … but she can’t really do much as an 18-year-old. 

Nora: So, she’s 18. She loses her dad, and she’s in charge of an estate, and she’s not even old enough to get a drink or get a rental car or a hotel room, and that’s such a huge foundational loss for anybody, but I also think for her, because her dad is her safe place in this world, so … where does she go from here? 

Claire: Her younger sister is still a kid and has to live with an adult, so she’s with her mom. Amber decides to go to college in Orlando, and she really gets it together. She gets a college degree! She meets a great guy, and they get engaged and move in together after graduation. And then … Amber’s mom dies. She had cancer, which Amber knew about, but her mom was never really open about how bad it was. So it did come as a surprise. And Amber’s little sister is 16, and Amber and her fiance invite her to come live with them. 

Nora: This is horrible but that’s also so sweet. And I have high hopes for the three of them … but I also have to assume this is not going to end well. 

Claire: And it is sweet! Like we heard earlier, Amber was upset that her sister couldn’t live with her when she was younger, so she’s happy she can bring her in now. But Amber and her husband are so young. They’ve just graduated college. They’re broke. They’re barely making ends meet. And it’s tight, adding a 16-year-old girl to the mix. But they’re doing it. And they’re happy to do it. Amber is giving her sister the stability she didn’t have at her age.  But then…

Amber Craft: It started with phone calls from collections companies.

Nora: Oh, no. 

Claire: I know. We’ll be right back. 

Nora: We’re back. Okay, Claire, Amber is 23 years old, living on her own with her fiance and little sister, and then out of the blue she starts getting calls from collections agencies. What are they saying?

 

Claire: Well at first, she’s really confused. Because at 23, she had never checked her credit. All of the bills in her college apartment were under her roommate’s name. She was never really taught financial basics like checking credit, so she had no idea what was going on with her report. When she’s talking to these collection agencies, they are saying she has outstanding debts that she didn’t know about.

Amber Craft: They were for accounts, Florida Power and Light, which is the utilities company in South Florida, where I grew up. And they were telling me about the address that was on the account, and it was an address that my mom lived at for a long time. And I told them, like, “I was a kid, like … I yeah, I know that address. I should be associated with that address at some point, I’m sure. But I didn’t make this account. Like, if you look at the date when it started, I would have been a minor. I don’t know how you even opened this account.”

Claire: The collections people are saying there are unpaid electric bills in Amber’s name, from her childhood home. And almost immediately, Amber knew what happened.

Amber Craft: I knew immediately that it … that it had to have been my mom, because she was always manipulating situations and being shady about things. And also, when they told me the address that the power bill was tied to, I knew that that was somewhere that my mom had lived a few years prior. But I was really ashamed of it at first. I didn’t even want to tell my husband about the situation. And I kind of let it go. Like I hid from it for a while. It felt like too big of a problem, something that was like, I’m not grown up enough to know how to handle this. So when the calls would come, for quite some time, a lot of the time I wouldn’t answer. Eventually, the times that I did answer, I would get really frustrated, and I usually wasn’t as nice to those … the people who were calling as I probably should have been. 

Nora: Well …yeah. As a general rule, I think you should be nice to every single customer service person, and I also think that people who work in collections know that they aren’t exactly making a friendly phone call. This is not a call anyone looks forward to receiving.

Claire: Right. And it takes a while for Amber to actually face things. One day, she answers the phone and she asks: What could I even do about this account? She tells them it’s not hers, her mom opened it…and her mom is dead.

Nora: And I’m sure they totally believed her and were like, “Absolutely. Of course, your dead mom opened this account in your name. So sorry to bother you. We’ll get this taken care of. Take it off your list of worries.”

Claire: Yeah, the red tape bureaucratic nightmare does not happen. Don’t worry, end of story!

Nora: “That’s on us! Don’t worry! We got it! Sorry to bother you.”

Claire: No! In fact, they say, “Well, if you think this was a crime, even if the person is dead, we need a police report.” So Amber goes down to the police station and files a police report against her dead mother.

Amber Craft: I remember explaining to the officer that this account was several hundred dollars and it was from when I was a kid, and my mom’s dead. So … I don’t know what to do. They told me I need a police report. So they filed this police report, and they kind of brushed me off. But I got the document I needed and I was able to submit that to this one bill collections agency. And that one was cleared.

Claire: That wasn’t the only account that Amber’s mom had opened in her daughter’s name. The calls keep coming and coming and coming, because there’s at least half a dozen accounts that have gone to collections. Accounts in Ambers name … but for addresses her mom lived in years ago.

 

Nora: And every account probably means she has to go back to the police department and start the process all over again?

 

Claire: That is correct.

Amber Craft: I’ve been to the Kissimmee Police Department so many times getting these same police reports and submitting them to collections agencies. And I know that you’re supposed to be able to pull your credit history and see all of the negative accounts in your name. And I do that. I look at it. And I don’t find them. Everything that has shown up on there has been taken care of. But then these new ones just keep coming and coming. I don’t know how it’s happening. I don’t understand where additional accounts are coming from, why they’re not already showing up on my credit history, if they’re already in collections, or if the companies who are sending these bills to collections are just working through a backlog or something. It just seems weird that multiple companies have been, first of all, accepting a child’s Social Security number, and second, sending bills almost a decade after. The police have said things like, “Because they’re dead, they won’t be committing any more fraud against you.” They’ve explained the whole identity theft process, and if I was worried that new accounts were going to be created in my name, they could help me lock my Social Security number or something like that. But in this case, all of the crime has already happened. There’s no threat of more crime, more accounts to be opened. But nobody’s given me any advice on how to find the accounts that are already negative in my name.

Nora: It’s not surprising. I don’t think anyone’s expecting a police department to offer psychological care and sit Amber down and be like, “I’m so sorry this happened to you. Your mother should’ve never done this.” It’s so hard to hear, even secondhand, that the threat is technically gone, right? Her mother has died. But she still has to reckon with the fact that a person who is meant to protect you, is meant to nurture you, not only failed her in those basic aspects when she was growing up, but also put her in this horrible position as a very recent adult.  

Claire: Yeah! And the emotional side of this, I can’t even fathom. But on top of that, she is in the middle of a bureaucratic mess, because as he said, the cops don’t really have a plan for this. She doesn’t know how many accounts are still out there. 

Nora: yeah. It’s always, like, whenever something emotionally disastrous happens, you can almost always count on paperwork being involved, which is really … it’s injury to insult, if I have to say. It’s not insult to injury. It’s injury to insult. Paperwork on top of this? Really? Now I have to fill out some forms? Are you kidding me?  

Claire: Also, this wasn’t the end of the surprises. As all of these collection calls were coming in, Amber realized it wasn’t just her mom that stole her identity. 

Amber Craft: I remember checking the mail as a kid, living with my dad, and seeing bills come in with my name on them. And I would ask my dad about them, and he would kind of blow them off. And so … I didn’t know any better, so I just trusted him. And after those first collections came through that were tied to my mom’s address, I got another one that I ended up tracking down to be tied to my dad’s address. This bill, I believe, to be the one– the account that was active when my dad died, so I want to trust and believe that my dad didn’t actually run up a lot of debt in my name. This bill was smaller. I think it just was unpaid because he died, and I didn’t know it existed. But still, he had opened the account in my name.

Nora: Her dad?!

Claire: I know. I know. And in our interviews with Amber, she very much wants to give her dad the benefit of the doubt, because he wasn’t a serial manipulator or scammer like her mom. But he did make the same choice. 

Nora: So what are we talking about? What’s a round number to go with these old debts that Amber has been stuck with?

Claire: It’s been around two thousand dollars at this point, because we were talking about utility bills. That was a lot for her in her early 20s. But now, the problem is: It’s messed up her credit, and it’s been this huge hassle.  

Amber Craft: I feel like I’ve been digging myself out of this big hole of bad credit, and I’ve made poor financial decisions that have affected it, too. But I think that it’s so much worse because of the fraud. Whenever I submit the police report and get an account wiped away, that does fix a little bit of my credit. I feel like it’s one step forward and two steps back. Every time I make a good decision, I am faced with another challenge that is not even my fault that I have to figure out how to solve. You’re supposed to be able to trust your parents to hold that information and help you make good decisions. But if you’re born into a family of untrustworthy people, then that can easily be abused.

Nora: So I mentioned that my brother had his identity stolen. I actually know many people who have gotten their identities stolen and the logistics are such a nightmare. And what Amber exis going through is compounded by the fact that this is a form of financial abuse, right? When she was a minor, both of her parents used her info to help themselves, and it’s now harming her. 

Claire: When I was working on this episode I told a friend who is a social worker about it and she said she actually sees this a lot with low-income families, kind of as an act of financial desperation. And that’s kind of how Amber views what her dad did, is he needed the help to get utilities for their home, and that’s one side of this.

Nora: Oh god, okay, and when you put it that way, I’m not excusing what Amber’s parents did. I am not. It’s a huge betrayal. But also … it is so hard to be poor in America. Why would you need credit of any kind to get necessities like power? Like power? That is a very basic human right. And as easy as it would be – or is – to judge this, I’ve also never been in a position where I had to choose between having electricity or using (stealing) my kid’s social security number to GET that electricity. And also, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s super harmful to the kid who never had a say in this. 

Claire: Right. And that’s kind of why Amber thinks, even though her mom and dad made the same choice, her dad’s in a different boat, because the debt wasn’t as high on the account he opened in her name. She thinks he was paying it while he was still alive because he didn’t want to burden her. I mentioned I talked to a friend who said she saw this alot. We talked to Amber. As I was working on this story, I began to wonder how common is this? Like, are Amber’s mom and dad – who might’ve had different intentions – are either of them the rule or the outlier when it comes to stealing the identity from their children?

Nora: When we come back, we hear from someone who can give us a little more context on financial abuse and identity theft among family members. 

 

Nora: When I first heard Amber’s story, I was really shocked. Screwing your kids over financially by stealing their identity feels so sinister. But as Amber mentioned when talking about her dad using her social security number, people get desperate! Her dad was in a bad spot financially. I’m not excusing it at all, but he was probably paying the bills in her name because his credit was bad. And as we were working on this episode, we wanted to learn more about familial identity theft – because, frankly, a lot of us hadn’t heard about it before. 

Axton: There is a statistic out there that I cite pretty regularly. It’s estimated that 30% of all identity theft victims have their identity stolen by a family member.

Nora: This is Axton Betz-Hamilton, a professor of consumer affairs at South Dakota State University, and one of the very few researchers focusing on familial identity theft. 

Axton: We see so much in the popular press about data breaches and, you know, secure your identity online, and blah, blah, blah. And that’s, that’s important, don’t get me wrong. But what we’re not talking about as much is that 30% of people who have their identity stolen by a family member.

Nora: Axton has committed her entire academic career, from undergrad, through her doctoral program, to her research now, studying identity theft. 

Axton: So research in this area is really challenging to conduct because, people aren’t talking about it. You know, there’s a sense of shame and stigma and trauma.

Nora: Axton is so diligent in her work, despite it being difficult to do, because she’s also trying to understand her own personal experience. 

Axton: What I understood about identity theft as a child was that there was some awful person out there who had stolen our Social Security number, our date of birth, our address, you know, all of our personal information. And we’re using that to do us harm.

Nora: This identity theft led to a slew of financial problems for the family throughout Axton’s childhood. Their phone and electricity services were turned off. Someone was stealing their mail, so they had to constantly get new PO Boxes. A sheriff even showed up at their house to arrest her mom because someone was writing bad checks at Walmart attached to a bank account in her name. Axton’s dad convinced the sheriff it wasn’t his wife, but the identity thief who was doing it. 

 

Nora: Axton’s mom was an accountant, so naturally she handled the family’s finances. Axton remembers watching her dad spend hours on the phone with utility companies, the post office, the police, trying to sort this all out. And eventually, both her parents became incredibly distrustful of anyone. The family became reclusive, because they felt the identity thief was someone close to them, but they didn’t know who. This chaotic and fearful dynamic plagued Axton’s entire adolescence.

 

Axton: So I went to college two hours away from home, in part to get away from the identity theft. I thought the identity thief couldn’t follow me to college. And boy, I was wrong about that. So my first year of college, I lived in the residence halls, you know, didn’t have utility bills or anything like that. And I moved off campus in my sophomore year, and I called the electric company to establish service at my little, humble apartment. And they told me the day and time that the service would be switched over to my name. And then a few days later, I received a letter in the mail from the electric company that said, “Due to your credit score, we need a $100 deposit to secure your electric service.” And there was a 1-800 number to call at the bottom of the letter to get a copy of my credit report. And I did, just out of curiosity, because I didn’t know what a credit report was, and I wanted to see what this unknown entity was keeping on me. And about six weeks later, this large manila envelope arrived in the mail. You know, I walked over to the mailbox with dread, saw it was from the credit reporting agency, and it was really thick. It was a really thick envelope. And I thought, “Credit reports must be really hard to read. They must come with a lot of instructions and disclosures.” But I went inside, opened the manila envelope and realized very quickly that credit reports are not difficult to read. They don’t come with a lot of instructions and disclosures, but rather mine was ten pages long and full of fraudulent credit card account entries and associated collection agency entries that dated back to the time that my parents’ identities had been stolen eight years earlier. So it could be assumed that the individual responsible for their identity theft was also responsible for my identity theft.

 

Nora: Now, Axton herself is a victim of identity theft. As she’s trying to live on her own for the first time, the cable and phone companies make her jump through hoops just to get service. When she buys her first car, the loan she gets has an 18 percent interest rate! Her first credit card charged more than 20 percent interest, all because her credit was trashed by some stranger when she was a kid. This is when she became interested in studying identity theft. If she couldn’t figure out who was doing this to her, maybe understanding the crime itself would make her feel better. So for the next 12 years, Axton starts her academic career with identity theft at the center of her research. 

 

Axton: Six months after I graduated with my Ph.D., my mom passed away from cancer, and 13 days after that, my dad called me. And he was pretty irate with me for running a credit card over-limit in 2001. And I asked Dad what credit card it was, and he told me and I said, “Dad, that was one of the credit cards that was taken out in my name as part of the identity theft.” And I said, “Where did you find that?” He said, “It’s out here in a file box of your mom’s in a file folder with your birth certificate.” And my blood ran cold. Because I had my birth certificate. And what logical reason would my birth certificate and a credit card statement that was fraudulent … what logical reason is there for those two things to be in the same file? 

 

Nora: In one phone call, Axton’s entire perception of her life shattered. She immediately heads back to her parents’ house to help her dad go through the rest of her mom’s files and try to find some answers.

Axton: From there, we found just more and more and more documentation that supported that her identity was never stolen. So that was a story that she made up and orchestrated quite well over a 20-year period. So when she ruined her own credit, she moved on to my dad’s, and then when she ruined his credit, she moved on to mine. Then once she realized she didn’t have total control over me and who I talked to and what I did two hours away, she ended up going back to Dad’s credit – because there are some things that we found like 2007, 2008 that were in his name that were fraudulent. And then when she ruined his credit, she moved on to my grandfather’s identity. Those 13 days between the time that Mom passed away and we found out that she was the person responsible for the identity theft, I do think Dad and I were going through a normal grieving process. But once we found out that Mom was the offender, the grief process stopped for both of us. And the best way I can describe it is: How can you grieve for someone that you clearly didn’t know? And I’m not sure that anyone really knew who my mother was.

Nora: Amber believes her dad was using her social security number because he was in a bad financial spot. But it didn’t seem like Axton’s mom and Amber’s mom had any plan to pay these bills back. They allowed their actions to have lifelong consequences for their kids. 

 

Nora: So between these three parents, there’s two ways to look at why they did it. And we asked Axton, as a researcher, which is more common.

 

Axton: Based on the more recent research I’ve done, I don’t think it’s because people who know you do this because they’re in a bad financial spot and they’re desperate. There’s some of that. But I think the majority, it’s tied to mental health over and over again. But when I interview victims, I ask them about their experiences with the offender. And, you know, again, some of them have said, you know, the offender had a diagnosed personality disorder, or they behaved in a way that is consistent with narcissism. So there’s more work to be done there to tease out what’s going on in those cases.

 

Nora: As she mentioned earlier, it’s hard to find people to participate in her research, so Axton doesn’t get very large sample sizes. She can’t make generalizations, but over and over she’s hearing from victims that their parents – the people who stole from them – also acted like her mom. They had narcissistic qualities and thrived on secrets. They lied and hurt those close to them. Axton has made the choice to look at her pain through an academic lens.

 

Axton: And so rather than getting bogged down in the emotions, it’s like, okay, what I’ve got in front of me is data. “I have to gather the data, I have to analyze the data. I have to figure out what was going on with my mom. I need, you know, objective sources of data.” And then, that’s just where my brain goes. So I don’t know that I’ve really emotionally processed as much as I have kind of, like, split it off and I just sort of treat it as a research problem that needs to be analyzed.

 

Nora: Axton is trying to learn from her mom’s crime so she can help others. She didn’t pick up on her mom’s habits because she didn’t even know that her mom was doing this. 

 

Nora: But Amber, who we heard about at the beginning of this episode, was different. When she reflects on her early 20s, when she was living on her own for the first time, she sees how she was acting very similar to her parents when it came to money. 

Amber Craft: Some of those bad habits were just kind of natural to me. I didn’t know how to deal with money, and I would, again, spend it pretty much as soon as I got it, because that’s how I saw adults using their money. So I took out student loans that helped pay for my room and board. And then I also took up two different part-time jobs while I was in college. And I would use that just frivolously, like I would spend the money as it came in on activities that all my other friends were doing or new clothes or eating out or whatever I wanted to spend it on. So there was … there were no savings.

Nora: There’s a lot we can inherit from our parents, like it or not. We can’t change all of it: Your eyes are your eyes, your height is your height … but there are some inheritances we don’t have to claim. It isn’t easy to shrug off the things that have been foisted upon us without our consent. It’s not fair to have to pay for the sins of your parents. It’s not easy to dig yourself out of a hole, physically, metaphorically, or financially. Especially not a hole that you were pushed into. 

Nora: Slowly, Amber is starting to change her relationship with money. She and her husband have worked on budgeting and have taken money management courses. She’s improved her credit and paid off debt. 

Amber Craft: But I also want to create a better future for myself than what my childhood was like. And I was just terrified that I was never going to get away from these debts. As they’ve continued to come, though, and I’m starting to understand the process a little bit more, I’m less worried about, like, my future.

Nora: If you are a victim of identity theft, no matter what kind, one resource you should seek out is the Identity Theft Resource Center. It’s free to call them, and they will walk you through all of the steps to try to take your identity back. 

 

Nora: Special thanks to Amber for sharing her story. And thank you to Axton Betz-Hamilton for sharing her story and her research with us. Axton also wrote a memoir, it is so good. It’s called “The Less People Know About Us.” We will obviously link to it in our show notes.

 

Nora: This has been “Terrible, Thanks for Asking.” Im Nora McInerny and the rest of our team is … Claire McInerny! Say hello! Claire McInerny might not be here anymore.

 

Claire: I was muted! I was muted. But I’m here. Hello.

 

Nora: She’s here! Claire McInerny, Jordan Turgeon, Marcel Malakebu, Megan Palmer, Larissa Witcher, and Eugene Kidd. 

 

We are an independent production. We are no longer a part of a giant media conglomerate, so thank you so much for being here. Everything that you do, listening to this episode helps our show. Sharing it with someone helps our show. Rating and reviewing it wherever you listen helps our show. If you want to support our show financially, no obligation, literally whatever, you can go to TTFA.org/Premium. You can get ad-free episodes. You can get some bonus content that we work super hard on. We also have a bunch of stuff linked. It’s all linked in the notes. Jordan’s been working really hard to put together a Substack for like, episode discussions, other stuff, and we are also going on tour again and we’re gonna just keep doing that throughout the year, so check the website for your cities and see where we’re going. 

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