Courtesy of Axton Betz-Hamilton Nineteen a minute: That's how quickly people become identity theft victims in the U.S. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 10 and 16 million Americans are defrauded each year in this way.
Thanksgiving can be an awkward time of year for some victims, since family members account for more than 30 percent of the identity thieves. Axton Betz-Hamilton knows this firsthand. Raised in a middle-class home -- her mother Pamela was a tax preparer, her dad a department manager for a grocery store -- her identity theft story is both a family affair and exponentially stranger than fiction. "We lived on hobby farms -- one in Portland, Indiana, 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. "Nineteen Thanksgivings came and went, and [my mother] cooked those dinners for us -- me and dad and my grandfather after he moved in in 1995. We were getting robbed by the hand that fed us the entire time," she said. The Damage Betz-Hamilton's identity theft story started in 1993. The charges on credit cards that were acquired using her Social Security number amounted to about $4,000, but the damage rippled out, impacting every aspect of her financial life. Betz-Hamilton first discovered that she had been victimized when, as a 19-year-old college student, she was moving off-campus, and the utility company asked for a $100 deposit. The reason: bad credit.
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