Beau Friedlander:
I just want to say before we start, guys, that I love you more than I like chocolate ice cream with whipped cream on it.
Adam Levin:
Be still my heart.
Travis Taylor:
Aren’t you lactose intolerant?
Beau Friedlander:
I am. You’re a dick.
Adam Levin:
Welcome to What the Hack? A show about hackers, scammers, and the people they go after. I’m Adam Levin, founder of Cyber Scout, and constantly amazed at how creative Beau can be in inventing introductions for himself.
Beau Friedlander:
No idea what you’re talking about. I’m Adam Levin, and I am a private investigator who lives in Philadelphia currently seeking lost dogs.
Travis Taylor:
I’m Travis Taylor and I’m neither one of those things.
Beau Friedlander:
Adam
Adam Levin:
Beau.
Beau Friedlander:
It’s Axton Betz Hamilton.
Adam Levin:
The Axton Betz Hamilton.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh my gosh.
Adam Levin:
Axton then.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Hi.
Adam Levin:
Long time. No see
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Indeed. It’s been a few years.
Adam Levin:
Absolutely.
Beau Friedlander:
I’m completely starstruck.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Why is that?
Beau Friedlander:
Because you’re like a celebrity in the whole world of these things that we talk about. Your story’s legend.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
I still haven’t quite integrated that into my self concept yet. I had this happen walking in the park the other day where somebody came up to me and was like, oh, you wrote that identity theft book? And I’m like, in this a sweatshirt and sweatpants and not even thinking that, Hey, I have recognition. It was a weird moment. But yeah, people do see me that way.
Beau Friedlander:
Count me as one of them. That’s me.
Adam Levin:
Okay. So I’m really excited today. We have, in my opinion, a very, very special guest. I mean a legend in our world, a wonderful writer, a remarkable person, and I’ve known her now for close to 10 years, and the story she tells is truly an amazing story. And Beau, Travis and I are fan boys.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah, no, it’s true. Actually. I hate that term, but I’ll take it today.
Adam Levin:
We are celebrity struck. We are not worthy. But anyway, our guest today is Axton Betz Hamilton. So anyway, Axton, we have Beau Friedlander. We have Travis Taylor. Hello. And we have a cast of thousands all hiding behind the screen. So tell us about yourself. Where do you live now?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
I currently live in Brookings, South Dakota, which is in East Central South Dakota, not too far west of Minnesota for those who may not be familiar with South Dakota. And what brought me here was the opportunity to be an assistant professor of consumer affairs at South Dakota State University.
Beau Friedlander:
What does that entail? What do you teach exactly?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
So consumer affairs is a broad term that captures consumer economics, financial planning, financial counseling, a little bit of business management. But I primarily teach in what we call the family financial management area. So I teach courses in financial planning as well as financial counseling.
Adam Levin:
Now this isn’t your first professorship, is it?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Indeed. So prior to coming to South Dakota State, I was an assistant professor of consumer studies, very similar to consumer affairs at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois.
Travis Taylor:
So what’s the difference between the affairs and the studies?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
The difference is really who was in charge of naming the program at the time. We are so inconsistent with how we name our programs in our field. So I’m basically teaching the same stuff.
Beau Friedlander:
Is that how you and Adam know each other? Because he was the director of consumer affairs for the state of New Jersey and you teach consumer affairs. Did you know have that in common?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Well, so how I met Adam, it was kind of a fluke. And what happened was I found where he had written about me and I contacted him to correct him because there were some information that was factually incorrect based on some developments in my identity theft case, which I know we’ll get to.
Beau Friedlander:
So let me ask the really dumb question. So you were the victim of identity theft accident?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Indeed, I was. And I was a victim at a time when identity theft wasn’t even a thing. People didn’t know about it. It wasn’t a household word. In fact, at the time that I was a victim of identity theft, people didn’t know I was a child at the time. People didn’t even know that children could have their identity stolen, so it wasn’t even on the radar.
Beau Friedlander:
So when is this about
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
1993
Speaker 5:
Axton bets Hamilton was 19 when she first requested a copy of her credit report. She expected a high score but got exactly the opposite.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
My credit report was 10 pages long, full of fraudulent credit card entries and associated collection agency entries.
Speaker 5:
She learned her identity had been stolen years earlier when she was just 11.
Adam Levin:
And in fact, in those days, all the way up till really the middle of the first decade of the millennium, when you had an identity theft issue, the consumer was never viewed as the victim. It was always the business that was the victim. Consumers were, we were all just collateral damage
Beau Friedlander:
Or potential or potential crooks.
Adam Levin:
That too oftentimes you were guilty until proven innocent when it came to any claim of being a victim of identity theft.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay, so you’re coming up on, it’s almost 30 years since that happened since you first were the victim of identity theft back in a time when the Gulf War had just started and it was a very, very different world. I mean that was, think about what 1993 was.
Speaker 7:
Just two hours ago, allied Air Forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
In 1993. Again, this was before child identity theft was even heard of. Really, my parents’ identities were stolen. At least that’s what I’d been told. So I watched them deal unsuccessfully with trying to recover from the identity theft because again, back at that time, consumers weren’t considered the victims the creditors were, and the businesses were so legally there really wasn’t a lot of recourse for my parents and the whole guilty until proven innocent thing that Adam just mentioned. That was definitely true for my parents. And we had our male come up missing and back at that time again, early nineties, we lived on a farm out in the country and we had a big yellow metal mailbox out by the road that anybody could have driven by and taken our mail. And we thought that’s what was happening. My mom got a post office box in town and our mail was still coming up missing, and this was everything.
This wasn’t just somebody picking out bills with personal information or stealing checks out of the mail. I mean, this was farm magazines, my pen pal letters because back then we wrote letters to each other by hand as kids. We didn’t do texting or TikTok or anything like that. So definitely different time, but it felt personal in that regard because they were taking not just personal information, but things that we liked that we enjoyed. My dad enjoyed the farm magazines. I looked forward to my pen pal letters and because our mail was being stolen, at least it seemed to be from within the post office, there was a family member suspect because that family member did work within post office. And there were other suspects as well growing up that my mom said, well, this person, we know they were able to afford this. Well, how can they afford that given their salary? And these suspects that mom came up with were people who were close to us. And so the way to deal with that was because we didn’t know who was responsible for the identity theft and in the eyes of the law, my parents weren’t victims. The way to protect ourselves was to pull back from those relationships. So those relationships with family friends, we just gradually faded away.
Beau Friedlander:
So your mom at this point said, the best thing we can do, since it might be this person or this person or this person, one of them being a family relation, was to withdraw from?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Yep.
We just gradually stopped talking with people. So family, friends, extended relatives, and on my mom’s side, there really wasn’t a lot of family. In fact, as of now, I’m one of two living relatives on that side having, but my dad’s extended family is huge, so he was one of 50 grandchildren. So there are a lot of relatives on that side, and we weren’t allowed to talk to them because many of the people on that suspect list that my mom seemed to be adding to, they were relatives on that side. Wow. We didn’t talk to them. So we didn’t go to family reunions. We didn’t gather for holidays and we didn’t talk to them on the phone. Of course, because of the identity theft, our landline was shut off. So it was a very isolating experience, but in a way it felt okay because it felt like it was our only method of self-protection.
Beau Friedlander:
Now your dad, your dad was the only other person living on the farm with you at the time?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Well, yes and no. So the farm that I grew up on was actually my grandfather’s farm. So we lived in a mobile home on the property,
Beau Friedlander:
Mom or dad’s side,
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
On mom’s side. And then when he passed away, that seemed to be the trigger point for the identity theft. He passed away in 1993. The identity theft started not too long after that. And when we moved into his house, so we moved from the mobile home into his house. My other grandfather, so my dad’s dad moved into the mobile home, so I always had a grandfather around. So that was a nice benefit. We didn’t tell my grandfather what was happening though. We didn’t talk to him about it because we weren’t sure if he would maybe tell my aunt or my uncle or he went to the American Legion every day. We weren’t sure. We might say something to that he shouldn’t. So we never discussed the identity theft with him, even though he lived with us from 1995 to 2011.
Beau Friedlander:
So the only people who knew were the three of you, your mom, your dad, and you. But
Adam Levin:
Now what exactly was the identity theft that they were experiencing? Yeah,
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Sure. Yeah, that’s an excellent question. So the identity theft that they were experiencing was all financial identity theft. So credit cards being taken out in their names, checks being written off my mom’s account, but it looked like a mirrored account. People going to payday lending places and cashing checks using that mirrored account,
Adam Levin:
That’s always a favorite.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
People establishing bank accounts in my mom’s name.
Beau Friedlander:
Was it a lot of money or a little money?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Well, so in total, and this is now knowing everything that happened at approximately $600,000 over a 20 year period.
Travis Taylor:
Wow.
Adam Levin:
That’s
Beau Friedlander:
Wait, but at the time though, when your mom was just experiencing these payday loan things and stuff, it was 600,000 then or later
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
The sum total. So back in the early nineties, it was a few hundred dollars here, a couple thousand dollars here on the credit card. They weren’t massive amounts.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay.
Travis Taylor:
What did you and your parents call it? How did you talk about it if you didn’t really know that that was a specific type of crime?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Mom called it identity theft. And as a kid, I just assumed that she knew that’s what it was because she worked in the financial services industry.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, she worked in financial services. So she understood what was being done to the family.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Yeah. So she understood. She understood what identity theft was, and she understood, at least I presume she understood what we could do to stop it, which really wasn’t that much back at that time.
Adam Levin:
But basically what’s going on is males disappearing. Strange accounts are appearing, money is disappearing here and there, and meanwhile your family is withdrawing from pretty much everybody. You’re becoming sort of like this island.
Beau Friedlander:
It’s like the third act in a game of clue.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah,
Beau Friedlander:
Everyone’s suspicious of everyone. So
Adam Levin:
It was the butler,
Speaker 8:
Every person in this room as the perfect motive. Did the butler do it? Clue it’s not just a game anymore.
Beau Friedlander:
So now the wagons are circled in this weird way. Your mom’s isolated the families to keep them safe from further crimes, right? That’s kind of where we are. And then what happened? Did it stop? Did the crime stop then?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Well, no. And one of my motivations for going away to college, which by the way was a big argument back at that time, going away to school versus living at home and commuting, I wanted to get away from the identity theft because it never seemed to go away. We seemed powerless in response to this, and there seemed to be no consequences for the person who was able to do all of these things. And it seemed personal stealing pen pal letters and stealing the farm magazines. It’s not just account numbers and social security numbers. It felt like someone close to us
Beau Friedlander:
And it felt like someone was trying to be mean.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Right? It felt like someone who had a personal vendetta with one of my parents or both of them.
And so I thought the way to get away from it was to go away to college. So I went a hundred miles away from home to Purdue for college, spent the first year in the dorms and didn’t have any problems financially, thought, okay, the identity theft is behind me. They won’t find me at Purdue. So that shows you how naive I was back then. And my sophomore year I moved off campus, got my first little dinky studio apartment that had the seventies wood paneling, but hey, I was proud of it. It was mine. And I called the electric company to establish service, and they told me the day and time they would switch on the service, but hey, things are great. We’re moving along. And a few days later they sent me a letter in the mail saying, we need a hundred dollars deposit to turn on service due to your credit score.
And by the way, here’s a number to call for a copy of your credit report. I didn’t think anything of it because I knew enough about credit then at 19 to know that not having enough credit can be just as damaging as having bad credit, but kids’ identities can’t be stolen. So the identity theft has nothing to do with me. So no big deal. I called the number to get a copy of my credit report from whatever credit bureau it was at that time, and I just wanted to see what a credit report looked like. I didn’t know. And about six weeks later, I remember getting off the city bus at my apartment building and seeing this really large manila envelope sticking out of the top of my mailbox. And I thought, oh, that looks official. What is that? And I got to my mailbox saw, it was from the credit bureau and it was thick. It was just like that.
Beau Friedlander:
Like a half an inch thick.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Yeah, it was about an inch thick. And I thought, oh, credit reports must be really hard to read. It must come with a lot of instructions
Adam Levin:
And disclosures. Those were the days when you received a hard copy credit report, the envelope screamed credit report,
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Right? And
Beau Friedlander:
Open me and steal this person’s identity,
Adam Levin:
Their whole credit. For someone who is living through an identity theft saga that seems to never be ending, to have this thing sitting there like a flashing red light going open me and steal what’s inside. That probably was a little disconcerting to and embarrassing a lot of people. They just felt funny. When other people knew they were getting a credit report, they figured something must be wrong.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
And in my case it was wrong.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, why wait a second? It shouldn’t have been so thick.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
So when I opened the envelope and again, expecting instructions and disclosures, my credit report was actually 10 pages long, full of fraudulent credit card entries and associated collection agency entries that dated back to the time that my parents’ identities were stolen back in 1993. So it could be assumed that the person responsible for their identity theft was also responsible for my identity theft.
Speaker 5:
Adam Levin runs identity theft 9 1 1 and says there are millions of cases like accidents, family members use a child’s name and social security number to open accounts. And since most companies the age, the fraud goes undetected,
Adam Levin:
It may only surface when the child actually applies for a credit product, whether they’re applying for a student loan or their car or their first credit card.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
So our three identities were stolen at the same time.
Adam Levin:
So how did you feel the precise moment that you were expecting a short story and ended up with war and peace in your envelope? What was the first thing that went through your mind, especially when you suddenly realized that your credit was mixed up in all of this as well?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
I thought I would never have anything. I thought I would never own a car, thought I’d never own a house. I thought I would never have a credit card. Those things that people take for granted who don’t have identity theft happen to them. I thought I would never be able to have those things.
Travis Taylor:
And so you said it went back as far as 1993. Was there anything more recent in there? Was someone doing that when you were still in college?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Well, there was stuff ongoing. So it started in 1993. This was 2001. There were things in there that through early 2001. But see by that point the identity thief had to stop because my credit score was three 80. They’d taken my credit and ruined it as far as they
Beau Friedlander:
Could. So there was no more to be had, no
Adam Levin:
More blood in the stone. Right.
Beau Friedlander:
You said earlier the total was $600,000. Now where are we now? When you looked at that report, how much were you on the hook for?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Just looking at the original, it was probably between 10 and 15,000 at that point. Wow.
Adam Levin:
Which for college student is
Beau Friedlander:
Huge
Adam Levin:
Heavy stuff.
Beau Friedlander:
Giant. So you were like, I’m done. Okay, great. I’m going to college and I’m never going to be able to pay for anything. Right. Okay. So then what happened?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Well, the next step was to call my mom because again, she worked in the financial services industry. I thought she would know what to do, and she told me to not take the identity theft personally because this is what identity thiefs do. They get someone’s information, they use it for what they can, they move on to somebody else. And that the identity thief in my case had to have been long gone because they couldn’t use my credit for anything else. My credit score was in the second percentile of all credit scores in the nation at that point. So really there was no blood left in the stone.
That wasn’t a very satisfactory response to me. And I’m a person who tends to grab the bull by the horns in many respects. And I thought, I’m going to start calling these original creditors because surely they’ll understand that I was under the age of 18 and they’ll remove the information from my credit report. I got a rude awakening on that. The first one I called the customer service representative said that my case wasn’t identity theft because someone made two payments on the card before stopping paying on the card. And that identity thieves don’t do that. So I was essentially being told I was a liar from the first place I sought,
Beau Friedlander:
Which is also patently incorrect.
Adam Levin:
That’s totally false.
Beau Friedlander:
Right. Identity thieves often will make a few payments so that they can increase the amount of blood in the stone. Right. Okay. So then what happened?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Well, again, I really thought I’m never going to own anything. And again, I’m guilty and so proven innocent and why is this happening to me? Who is so angry at my parents that they’ve ratcheted up another step and they’ve stolen their child’s identity. That’s a level of personalization that wasn’t there before. At that time from our perspectives, and I took it upon myself to file a report with the Indiana State Police because I thought they would be the best law enforcement agency to take the report. Since my parents lived in Indiana, I lived in Indiana just a hundred miles away. And I thought they have jurisdiction over the whole state. They’ll be the ones who can do something about this. And at 19, I wanted lights, sirens, and hail a gunfire if necessary at this point, just take ’em down. And I didn’t get that.
Adam Levin:
Wear Sean Connery when you need him.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Exactly. And the Indiana State Police did take a report. It’s a very brief report. It said, I’m trying to remember the exact wording, unknown suspect, open credit cards in complainant’s name. I remember it was two lines on the sheet and I was given a copy of the report and said, I was told, good luck. You’ll need to show this to original creditors. And that was the extent of the involvement from the Indiana State Police. I’m not trying to say anything bad about our state police, but back at that time, and I didn’t realize this, that was actually a good response from law enforcement.
Adam Levin:
No, a lot of law enforcement people in those days were like, this has nothing to do with us. There’s nothing we can do about it.
Beau Friedlander:
But Adam, call
Adam Levin:
The FBI,
Beau Friedlander:
Adam, I know you’ll remember this, but remember I had not that long ago, my identity was stolen and I needed to get a police report. You always have to get a police report when there’s an instance of identity theft because your creditors do need to see it. And I went to the police station and he literally said, it’s not my job. And I was like, it is your job actually. And he said, no. And I actually had to say, listen, I work in the media and if you want to play this game, then we can have an article come out about how you’re wrong about this. Or you can take the report. Mumble, mumble, mumble. He took the report, he didn’t want to do it. It was a lot of work. And that is so you did great actually, because even nowadays, they don’t want to fill out that form. It is about a half an hour’s worth of paperwork.
Adam Levin:
And you were 19, correct? At the time, yes.
Travis Taylor:
Had you discussed this with anyone out other than your parents at that point before?
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah, A counselor at college or something,
Travis Taylor:
But you’d been cut off from a lot of your family friends and everything like that. And just wondering if the secret was out at that point or was this a thing for discussion or was it still very much kept under wraps?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Back at that time, there really weren’t a lot of resources on college campuses to help students with financial issues. There was psychological counseling services available, financial aid counseling available, but financial wellness programs and things of that nature didn’t exist back then like they do today. So there really weren’t the appropriate resources on campus for me to reach out to. And I’m not sure that given where I was at that time, and given my family’s experience and how that shaped my worldview of who to trust and who not to trust, I’m not sure that I would’ve reached out for help to anyone outside of the family, beyond the original creditors and the police.
Travis Taylor:
That sounds like it must’ve been very isolating.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
And I think that was planted by mom and really dad too, because dad believed that keeping this to ourselves was really the best option. To not tip off the identity thief to anything that we might be doing to try and catch them or stop them growing up in that environment, you really learn to not trust because everybody’s motives are questioned. If I would walk through a store with mom, I would look at people and think, oh, is it you? Are you the thief? Are you the thief? Are you the thief? And that was what was going through my head that really messes with your sense of trust. That’s still something that I off and on struggle with today.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh man.
Adam Levin:
Well, and in the world of identity theft, and especially when you’re dealing with victims, it is not uncommon that there is this shame culture where either you think you did someone wrong, something wrong, or you’re embarrassed or uncomfortable speaking to anyone about it.
Beau Friedlander:
But there’s the blame that I could blame the victim thing, Adam.
Adam Levin:
Yeah, that’s really was It’s blame the victim because oh, well you must have
Beau Friedlander:
Must’ve done something wrong.
Adam Levin:
Yeah, you told somebody something you shouldn’t have told them and they got the information or you did something dumb or whatever. And in so many situations involving identity theft, the victim did nothing wrong at all. And instead of feeling shame, they should be comforted.
Beau Friedlander:
Where in the story with your mom saying, chill, be chill, that you’re done. It won’t happen
Adam Levin:
Anymore. It also doesn’t sound like a very mom kind of statement for moms.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, I don’t think she said be chill, to be fair.
Adam Levin:
No, but I’m just simply saying, Hey, that’s the way stuff happens. Live with it. It’s like, no.
Beau Friedlander:
Did you think it was weird that your mom was not outraged with you or was that kind of what you expected?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Oh, that was what I expected. Mom was very factual, very direct. That was just how she was in our family. She was the one who was the financial wizard. And in my parents’ relationship, and I think my dad would agree with me on this, she was the smart one because she went to college and dad. And so that dynamic was well established and that created some relative power with mom that maybe dad didn’t have so much of. And so she was the one you listened to. She was
Beau Friedlander:
Right. Did she help you dig out of that 10,000, $15,000 hole? I mean, if she was the wizard, that would be the next move. No. Nope. What happened?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
She said that the accounts would just age off my credit report and to not worry about it. And I didn’t take that for an answer. So I actually put my dad too. And his reaction nearly broke the receiver. His was a far more appropriate parental response. You’d have to bleep out the words if I actually said what he said on here.
Adam Levin:
Well, also when they talk about aging out of your credit report, it’s like seven years, especially to somebody 19. That’s like an eternity plus one.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Absolutely.
Adam Levin:
So, okay, now you’ve been told that it’ll age out. Now what?
Beau Friedlander:
You’re all done and it didn’t happen anymore and everything’s cool.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Well, no. No. So I really started working on getting my credit report clear because again, I didn’t feel like this was fair to me. There was a part of me that thought, I’m in college and I really can’t be stopped from doing this. How did you do that? My mom can’t say no, don’t do that. So I started contacting original creditors collection agencies, which by the way, collection agencies generally are not very sympathetic to identity theft victims and contacting the credit reporting agencies. And I did that to dispute those fraudulent accounts. And I started working to build good credit while I was going through that process because that process was so slow and so painful. And sometimes those disputed accounts would be verified simply because my name and social security number matched. Well, of course it did. That’s the whole game of the identity theft. Your name and social security number matched. It looks like your debt. So it is your debt.
Adam Levin:
So what kind of good credit were you building at a time when nobody wanted to give you credit because your credit score was somewhere below a submarine in the middle of the men trench in the Atlantic Ocean. That’s
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
A very good descriptor
Adam Levin:
Beau. And I like to talk about being on the bottom of Loon Lake under a bottle cap, but in your case, you were in the great trench. So how’d you do it?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
I applied for a credit card from a subprime lender. In fact, my credit score was good enough to get the platinum card, not the gold or the silver. I got the platinum card with a $300 credit limit, a $69 annual fee that was assessed before they would send the credit card. And the a PR on that credit card was 29.992.
Adam Levin:
Whoa.
Beau Friedlander:
So you got the new truism, which is there’s nothing more expensive than having bad credit.
Adam Levin:
Did they require you to put up a deposit as well? Because many of these guys used to do that. They’d want a deposit to cover the full amount of the account, and then as you made payments, they would then back off to like 50% of the account in the deposit.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
No. And maybe that’s something that they did with the gold and silver card holders. I guess I was privileged with the platinum account, and so I had that card for a month, and then the car that I had was not worth repairing. And I went car shopping and I needed a car loan. And at the time I was living in Illinois and I drove over a hundred miles one way to find a dealership that would give me special financing. Special financing is not a good thing. Special financing on a five-year-old used car and forget what I paid actually for the car. But I do remember the A PR on that loan. 18.23% That was putting a car on a credit card?
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah. Yeah, 18%. 18%.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
And that was with my mom.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, your mom co-signed, right. Well that’s nice. So you got some help from your mom there and you got a car and are you on the road to now? Did you make all your payments in a timely way and you basically were staying on top of it? What
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
I did is I made on-time payments for six months at that 18.23% a PR and then applied to refinance and got the interest rate cut in half.
Beau Friedlander:
Nice.
Adam Levin:
Now, while you were doing this, was there any parallel identity theft continuing with you as your credit score was starting to build itself back up again?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
No. Which at the time, it made what mom said when I was 19 about how identity themes use your credit and move on. Made sense because it’s like the person responsible for it just moved on.
Beau Friedlander:
It does make sense. Totally. And then you got to build your credit up again and you were doing it slowly. And from that moment, you never experienced identity theft again, correct? Huh? So where’s the $600,000 coming from?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Well, that is the combined total of all of our identity thefts because it turns out that even though the identity theft with me stopped, it continued with my dad and it continued with my grandfather. And while all of this was going on with me getting a new car and getting that credit card, we didn’t know his identity had been stolen.
Beau Friedlander:
Did anyone else in your family experience identity theft? Or was it just the people living on the farm?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Yeah, just the people living on the farm. Just the immediate family there.
Beau Friedlander:
We need the Sean Connery moment. So clearly this identity thief got caught and went to jail for 20, 30 years. No, no.
Adam Levin:
While this was happening, what were they continuing? Was it credit cards, payday loans, or did they take a new avenue in order to
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah, were there like houses or businesses or caterpillars?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Yeah. What was continuing with my mom and dad was new bank accounts, credit cards, tax related issues, utility accounts, both state and federal tax issues.
Adam Levin:
So in other words, someone was filing fake returns and then diverting refunds. Was that what was going on there?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Turns out they were filing fraudulent information to try and avoid paying taxes altogether. I don’t know if there were actually any refunds. Every issue from the documentation I have it. That doesn’t appear to be the case.
Beau Friedlander:
Alright. So then we’re now at the point where, and your mom’s also presumably having identity theft happen to her as well this whole time. Correct? Correct. Presumably at some point everybody’s credit was wrecked.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Oh, it
Beau Friedlander:
Was. So then did everyone start rebuilding their identity and you never figured out who it was or
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Mom and dad kind of gave up on that in terms of rebuilding their identity? My dad became a cash only kind of guy, pay the electric bill in cash, pay the cell phone bill in cash, pay for cars in cash, and he just decided he didn’t need credit. And presumably mom was the same way and they just did without, I was the only one who worked on rebuilding my credit and I felt like I had to, because of my age, my grandfather didn’t know that he was a victim of identity theft and he didn’t have a lot of knowledge about finances, so he didn’t work at all to rebuild his credit either.
Adam Levin:
Now how old was your grandfather while this was going on?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
He passed away in 2013 at the age of 83. So this would’ve been going on in his late seventies and early eighties,
Adam Levin:
Which it’s terrible for a senior citizen to have to live through this along with everything else.
Beau Friedlander:
So I am hearing you now. We’re now at 2021. You seem like you’ve got some peace in your heart. Is that because you did finally figure out who the identity thief was?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
I did. And along the way I earned two graduate degrees in the process. And while earning those degrees, I focused on identity theft and child identity theft in the hopes that I would learn something that would lead me to the big reveal of who was responsible. That actually happened six months after finishing my doctoral program.
Beau Friedlander:
And how many years after 1993 was that?
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
- So I finished my doctorate in 2012, and then in 2013 found out the person responsible. So full 20 years almost to the day from the time that the identity theft started to when the offender was identified.
Beau Friedlander:
Wow. And what was the situation? So
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
It was actually a very sad occasion. My mom had been diagnosed with leukemia on the very same day that I officially finished my doctoral program. And she passed away from leukemia. Six months later. Two weeks after that, my dad called me and he was livid. So this is February 25th, 2013, this data is burned into my brain. And he called me up and he’s just yelling at me for running a credit card over the limit in 2001. And I said, what credit card is it? And he told me, and I said, dad, that was one of the credit cards that was taken out my name as part of the identity theft. And he said, well, it’s in a file box of your mother’s and it’s in here in the file folder with your birth certificate.
Beau Friedlander:
Whoa.
Axton Betz-Hamilton:
Yeah. And so my blood ran cold because I had my birth certificate, the original that was handwritten and I knew where it was. It was in my house. What birth certificate was this? And come to find out, it was a certified copy that was issued from the County Health Department on June 7th, 2000. So it wasn’t the original. So that was the credit card and the birth certificate together. I knew then that she was the one that her identity had never been stolen.
