Her Mother Stole Her Identity, Defrauded Her Of About $600,000, And She Only Uncovered The Elaborate Con After Her Mom’s Death
One of the most nightmarish scenarios that occur in our modern world is becoming a victim of identity theft. The crime can happen to anyone at any time.
You could wake up one morning to find that someone has drained your bank accounts, ruined your credit, and tarnished your reputation. Identity theft can have a devastating impact on individuals and families.
Usually, the perpetrators are skilled hackers or thieves who dig through trash bins for sensitive information. But in rare cases, the thief can be someone very close to you, as seen in Axton Betz-Hamilton’s story.
After the death of her mother, she realized that her mother had been responsible for the elaborate con all along.
Axton grew up in Portland, Indiana, surrounded by farmland. She lived with her parents in a mobile home on her grandfather’s 100-acre farm. Her father worked on the farm, and her mother was a tax preparer.
Everything about their lives was completely normal until her grandfather died. At the time, she was 11 years old. Her mother took his death really hard. She ordered lots and lots of things, particularly jewelry. It appeared to be her way of coping with the pain.
Around that time, their mail started disappearing. Axton’s father’s copies of The Brayer, a magazine about raising donkeys, stopped showing up, even though they had been paying for it regularly.
Bills began to stop arriving as well. Her parents thought that one of the neighbors must be stealing their mail to gain access to their personal information. Her mother proposed that someone was after the farm.
Axton’s father, John, worked long hours, so he didn’t have time to investigate the issue. Her mother, Pam, took the lead. Since Pam had majored in finance in college, they trusted her to resolve the situation.
pressmaster – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
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As a tax preparer, Pam claimed to have spent many hours dealing with the problem, filing requests for formal investigations to be launched with the police. However, their mail continued to go missing.
By the time Axton was in the eighth grade, their family had withdrawn from society. Pam had told them that they all needed to limit their interactions with the outside world to protect themselves from the perpetrator. So, they kept their curtains closed and stopped socializing with friends and neighbors.
When Axton was 19 years old, she discovered that her identity had been stolen after enrolling at Purdue University. There were pages of fraudulent activity, and the first credit card in her name had been opened when she was just 11 years old.
She went on to study identity theft, earning a master’s in consumer sciences and retailing and then getting a Ph.D in human development and family studies. She also hoped to catch the perpetrator along the way.
In 2012, she won an award for her research on childhood identity theft. A few days later, her mother was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. Within six months, Pam was dead.
Two weeks after her death, Axton received an angry phone call from her father, demanding to know why she had racked up such a hefty credit card bill in 2001. The credit card statement was in her name; he had found it while going through Pam’s old paperwork.
That was when Axton realized that her mother was the one behind the identity theft. Over the next five years, she uncovered piles of paperwork her mother had hidden, including pay stubs in her mother’s maiden name, life insurance policies she had never paid the premiums on, and rejection letters for a bank account in Wisconsin.
She also read through her mother’s Facebook messages and saw that she had been creating a new series of identities.
Overall, Axton and her father calculated that Pam had defrauded them of around $600,000. Pam had even stolen money that had been set aside for Axton’s college tuition. To this day, it’s unclear what exactly Pam spent all that money on.
There are still many missing pieces to the puzzle, and Axton is determined to get to the bottom of it. Today, she is an assistant professor of consumer affairs at South Dakota State University and lives with her husband and cats.
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