Axton Betz-Hamilton got a phone call from her dad giving her a hard time about an overdue credit card bill, only upon closer inspection there was also a card in her moms name on the same account.
That’s when a 20-year fraud began to unravel.
Although, Betz-Hamilton’s mom, Pamela Betz died in 2013 details of her secret life started to emerge. She’d stolen her daughter’s identity, her husband’s and her father in law’s identity.
“We lived on hobby farms—one in Portland, Ind., and then another in Redkey,” Betz-Hamilton told me. Thanksgivings were with family. Her paternal grandfather moved in during the ‘90s. (He had been a welder at a tractor factory.) Together, they were a small family unit that looked like many others, though in reality they were ensnared in a mind boggling circle of financial fraud.
For years she struggled with her credit, trying to get by with low credit scores as she tried to clean up the mess that identity theft had caused, all the while not knowing that her mom was the cause.
“Nineteen Thanksgivings came and went, and [my mother] cooked those dinners for us—me and dad and my grandfather after he moved in 1995. We were getting robbed by the hand that fed us the entire time,” she said.
source:abcnews
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