The Identity Thief Who Stalked Me For Decades Was My Mom
Axton Betz-Hamilton realized her identity had been stolen when she was just 19 years old. For years, she says, the thief used her social security number to open credit cards and spend endless amounts of money. In Betz-Hamilton's new memoir The Less People Know About Us, she says she never suspected that her own mother, Pam, was behind the elaborate con. But when a trove of unearthed credit card statements suggested otherwise, she suddenly saw the clues everywhere.
Two weeks after mom died in 2013, I got an angry phone call from dad. He was going through a box of her old paperwork and found a credit card statement in my name that was run over its limit.
"What the hell were you thinking?" he screamed.
Since the mid-'90s, my family had been plagued by an incessant identity thief who stole our mail and opened credit cards in our names, sending us into a whirlpool of inescapable debt. "That must be one of the credit cards taken out by the thief," I reasoned. "But what was mom doing with that?"
"I don't know," he said, "but it's here in this file folder, along with your birth certificate."
My heart sank. After decades spent battling bad credit scores, I realized we finally found the perpetrator who'd nearly destroyed our lives. I was hit with a wave of relief—finally! we were free!—followed by a deep, burning anger. The person who haunted us so relentlessly, and for so many years, was my own mom.
I grew up in the very rural community of Portland, Indiana, where cows outnumbered people and family dinners consisted of buckets of Lee's Famous Recipe chicken. We had a mobile home on my grandfather's 100-acre farm and lived a pretty typical Midwest life, driving tractors and participating in the 4H club. Dad worked on the farm, and mom was a tax preparer. We were comfortable, happy even. But everything shifted when grandpa died.
I was 11 at the time, and saw the toll his death took on mom. After work, she went straight to the couch to watch the Home Shopping Network until she fell asleep. She ordered things. Lots of things. It was always jewelry, and not the expensive kind, either.
I told myself the costume jewelry was mom's way of distracting herself from the pain. I thought it was her way of grieving. Now I wonder if it was an early warning sign that she was spiraling.
It was around that same time that our mail started disappearing. Letters I expected from friends never came. Dad's Brayer magazine, a specialized journal from the American Donkey and Mule Society, didn't show up. Bills stopped arriving. My parents thought it was the neighbors or an outside family member stealing our mail to get access to our social security numbers and account information.
Mom posited that someone must be after grandpa's farm.
The first time I heard the word "identity theft," was during an argument between mom and dad. "You know what? I'm tired of this shit. I'm going to the police to talk to them about the identity theft myself," dad yelled.
"No, no, no," mom said. "You can't do that. You'll mess up everything." Mom majored in finance in college and oversaw all of our family finances. We trusted her implicitly to stop the identity theft. She got us a new PO box and said she filed a request for a formal investigation with police. Looking back, I'm not sure she actually went to the police. Our mail continued to go missing and we crept further toward financial ruin.
From then on, everything we did as a family was to protect ourselves from inadvertently tipping off the perpetrator. "We really need to limit our interactions with people," mom told me. So, we withdrew. We didn't go out and do things anymore. People didn't come over, and we never went to other people's houses. I was told not to open our drapes, because someone could spy on us.
Desperate to get away from the paranoia, I enrolled at Purdue University after graduating from high school. I was 19, a sophomore, when I realized I hadn't escaped at all. I requested my first credit report and found myself in the lowest 2 percent. The identity thief had followed me to college.
Debt collectors called me constantly and sent letters for debts that weren't mine. I changed my phone number, but still they came. I couldn't buy a car or get a nice apartment. When I contacted a creditor to say I was an identity theft victim, they called me a liar.
I wanted to understand the psychology behind identity theft, so I got a PhD from Iowa State and wrote my dissertation on the lasting effects of child identity theft. I became an expert on the topic and appeared on many local television shows to tell my story, hopeful to bring awareness to the issue. One miserably cold morning in February 2012, I did a segment on Channel 13 in Indianapolis. I sat in the car eating Cheerios to calm my nerves and called up mom. She was so proud of my work, she told me, and I believed her.
In August 2012, mom was diagnosed with a very rare form of leukemia. After she died, I grieved as any normal child might. But the day I figured out she was the identity thief was the day I stopped grieving. Dad and I determined there's around $600,000 that's either misappropriated or totally unaccounted for because of her. I also discovered she stole money set aside for my college tuition. I'm still paying off the $50,000 worth of student loan debt I racked up over the years—debt that should have never been there in the first place.
Where did the $600,000 go? I wish I knew. I don't think mom has a secret stash of cash anywhere. She was never a saver. I've theorized that perhaps she bought property under someone else's name or even set up a phony business using a different name. I haven't hired a private investigator to look into it yet because I want the satisfaction of unraveling the truth about mom all by myself.
I'm still missing pieces, but I'll never stop trying to complete the puzzle. I think there are people out there who know things about her and don't realize it. Or maybe there are people who know things but don't want to talk.
If mom were alive today, I would ask her why she did what she did and why she hurt her family. To be honest, I don't think she'd tell me the truth. For so long, I was angry with her. But now I feel like she's something to be studied or analyzed. I hope that by sharing my story, other identity theft victims can find comfort in knowing they're not alone and there's light at the end of the tunnel. I now work as an assistant professor of consumer affairs at South Dakota State University and live happily with my husband and our cats. It might take 20 years, but you can recover.
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