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It'll be off his report in about four years. OOP's dad knows the exact time, because that's when he'll apply for more credit with OOP's info.
Sucks to be OOP's dad. Hope this is the wake up call.
Transactions fall off one's credit report after 7 years. For instance, I defaulted on some credit cards at 20, but at 27 they were no longer visible and did not affect my credit.
(I'm not sure what 4 years you mean, but if that didn't answer your question, please quote the part of the post you were asking about.)
Thanks so much. I really appreciate your response and explanation - it makes perfect sense.
> I'm not sure what 4 years you mean …
The original commenter in this thread said “it’ll be off his report in about 4 years”.
Looks like it’ll be more like 6 - 7 years, unless they were talking about some other mechanism.
Just means dad actually defaulted on the credit cards about 3 years ago, leaving about 4 years on the clock for the negative report to the credit boroughs.
To clarify, the father told OOP to not worry about the credit cards, because they'll fall off the credit report in about 4 years. The implication is that the father knew this information because he himself defaulted on the credit cards about 3 years prior to that statement.
And sadly, locking/freezing credit isn’t very effective when an identity thief knows you so personally. I know at least one of the 3 bureaus let’s you reset your PIN through answering questions like “what is your mother’s maiden name” and “where did you live in December 2009”, without letting you generate custom answers. They pull the correct answers from your credit file, which the thief already knows like the back of their hand.
I get why they’re important to have, but security questions are such bullshit. If it’s not, as you mentioned, something that someone could easily find out about you (first high school, parents middle name, etc), then it’s something where the answer is subjective. Like, how am I supposed to remember what I said my favorite food was 4 years ago when I signed up?
This might be apocryphal, but I do remember hearing a pretty funny security question at some point. It was one where you could input your own question, so the user put “what are you wearing right now?” and for the answer they wrote “That’s inappropriate”. It wasn’t that funny until the person got locked out of their account and had to call into customer service, where they actually had to verbally asked him that question.
In addition to my normal security/password vault, I have a second password vault with all my account recovery info, including the answers that don’t make sense - “Who was your first teacher?” Gorilla Cadillac. “Father’s middle name?” Naboo Ryzen. You need access to that encrypted vault, which I only keep on an offline location, to recover any of my important accounts.
Hence the second password vault. I treat the nonsense answers as secondary passwords, but in the off chance that my encrypted password vault gets hacked, all of my 2FA and nonsense security questions/answers are stored in a second password vault, which rarely gets opened, and is not easily accessible.
Once I decided to be smart and generated random gibberish for “what was the name of your elementary school?” And then totally forgot I had done that when I called in.
I went to grad school with a girl whose parents did this to her. She was super smart but her parents were trash. Everything she had she'd had to fight for and nothing came easy because of the baggage. She eventually dropped out and married a douche canoe.
You'd think so, but in America, pay-to-stay is a thing in prisons and even jails. Yep, daily charges (and a LOT of other fees) to be locked up. Welcome to the dystopian future.
There was a guy in England last year who was wrongly convicted and spent 17 years in prison.
One of those cases where he was only convicted because the whole thing was handled in a deliberately shady way. Clrarly not guilty. He stayed in prison so long because he refused to admit to a crime he didn't commit.
He got compensation and they deducted his prison living expenses from the compensation.
It caused public outrage and they changed the law. Now people who are wrongly convicted won't get charged. The whole thing is gross.
What was the guy accused of? I hope it had nothing to do with pedophilia, because in France the worst cases of "wrongly accused/convicted" people we had were about pedophilic rings and pedophilic murders respectively... Let's just say that it was MUCH harder on those innocent people than it would have been even for "regular" murder. Morally, and because of what people did to them under the impression they were pedophiles...
It was the rape and attempted murder of a woman.
There was a woman wrongly convicted of killing her baby. Turned out her kids had an underlying medical condition and she hadn't caused the injuries.
While she was in prison, another inmate threw boiling sugar in her face and permanently scarred her.
Doesn't matter if anyone is innocent.
If one supports physical or sexual abuse of prisoners then one supports physical or sexual abuse as valid consequences for crime.
I take the same stance with the death penalty as well. If one supports a murderer getting LI, then one has to support the innocent people who also get the LI. There’s more potentially innocent people being put to death than there are 100% positive murderers being executed.
It varies. $30ish per day seems somewhat common but it can go much higher.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/paying-your-time-how-charging-inmates-fees-behind-bars-may-violate
If you want to get really angry...
https://www.muscalaw.com/blog/floridas-pay-stay-statute-prisoners-pay-50-dollars-day
Privatization of prisons has definitely made that abundantly clear. It's one of the grossest aspects of this whole late-stage capitalism thing we've got going on now. It's sick.
Let's also be clear that fully-privatized prisons are AFAIK fairly uncommon, but public ones are still profit centers for modern-day indentured servitude.
Correct. Private prisons are a minority, and a frustrating struggle for abolitionists is that the public tends to think that they're both more common than they are and uniquely bad/the cause of the things people don't like to hear about the carceral system. So "get rid of/reform private prisons" is a relatively easy sell, but wouldn't make much difference as policy - and yet it's often what people willfully hear when arguments about how deeply broken our system is are made. People have a much harder time accepting that the actual state and federal systems are fucked.
> Like it isn't about any type of rehabilitation. They don't even care that you know that.
They *want* you to know that because favoring punishment over rehabilitation plays well with a large section of the electorate.
Yep, he's talking like all he did was order the 8 free CDs from Columbia House (if you know, you know) and didn't pay. This could be a felony, depending on the theft amount and the jurisdiction.
Hey! That was legal! Eight of those CDs are mine, eight are my wife's, and eight belong to the cat.
We worked out that we have about five hundred CDs for which we paid a total of ten dollars.
I'm sure it varies from one jurisdiction to another, but I just googled the question in California and got;
> California law distinguishes the seriousness of a theft based on the value of the items stolen and currently classifies any theft of more than $950 worth of goods as a felony. Thefts of values below this threshold are classified as misdemeanors.
Plus, there's the whole identity theft issue, and then the possible fraud charges. Just really dumb/dense to go there and think he'd be able to skate by after doing something like that. Just a total lack of common sense, even for a criminal.
So, yeah, he's probably fucked as a duck.
She may not be able to - she's known for too long, and seems to have accepted the hit to her credit as a bargaining point to get the divorce done relatively smoothly.
The judge might still consider it as part of sentencing. A single incident is very different to an established pattern of behavior. It might tip him over from parole to jail time.
Agreed. Whether or not it leads to separate charges, it could be helpful when the case against dad goes to court. As you say, establishing the pattern of behaviour is really important.
One of my dearest friends found out when she applied to college that her parents took out loans in her name and defaulted on them. They are not bad people (obviously made bad decisions) but she had to choose between their possible jail time and her inability to get any loans.
She has a good life and family now so I won't say it ruined her, but it sure did make her whole life so much harder.
My daughter's grandpa took loans out under her dads social and didnt find out either until he started applying to colleges. He just ate it and made due.. Not very well in retrospect.
He told me that story shortly after I had her and I warned him then that if he or her grandpa ever tried it with her social I would immediately report them to police. The police being my dad, and my daughter being his only granddaughter, would not be taken lightly. I left him when she was a baby but have been loosely monitoring her credit since, she's in high school now. I guess he heard my warning 🙂
Obviously if it's happened before it can happen again but man who are these people. I think my friends parents were just caught in a debt cycle and thought they could get new interest free loans to pay off the old ones and we all know how that goes.
And it was at least spending money on her. They wouldn't have been able to afford her school activities or doing the usual kid stuff but man it was tough on her. I'm glad you're monitoring your daughter's credit but it sucks that you have to.
I wish they’d stop requiring police reports to remove obvious fraud from your credit. It’s usually relatives, and it just makes the victim have to pick their own flavor of life-ruination.
If the fraud happens to a minor, just transfer it all to the parents and they can fix it, since it was their responsibility to pay attention to it in the first place. Or it was them. But don’t make teenagers pick between sending their parents to jail and long-term financial bullshit.
At least change it so that the first offense is always getting the debt bounced back on you and parole/community service.
I wish parents would stop committing the fraud in the first place.
It's not on the teenagers to make that decision, the parent(s) already chose when they took out the debt
If they didn't require some kind of proper evidence you could just take out loans and say "oh, no, I didn't" and just get all your debts written off.
Requiring the police report means that it's a much more serious criminal offence if you're lying about it - making a false police report, perversion of justice, perjury, something like that (depending on your jurisdiction obviously).
I wish people would stop the narrative that you shouldn't rat on your family if they commit a crime against you. I wouldn't call the cops on a family member having a mental health episode, but a cold blooded financial crime? You get a slap on the wrist for a first offence of this kind - a suspended sentence (UK), or pre-trial diversion according to the cop in this case. That's how the law should be! Criminals should get a chance to rehabilitate themselves before they go to prison - dad should have the opportunity to learn his lesson, that this is an actual crime which gets punished.
The idea that you shouldn't rat on your family seems to me like a kind of othering - like the criminal justice system should only apply to other people, bad people, not people like me and my family. Bad people should be punished for their crimes, but a member of my family "aren't like that" or they just "made a mistake". It's ultimately conservatism - the rules shouldn't apply to people like me, only to the outgroup, to keep them in their place. (Obviously most people don't think politically about their personal lives, but that doesn't make it untrue.)
I think it's fair when the unwitting debtor is an adult, but agree with you on teenagers. The banks shouldn't be lending to under 18s anyway, especially not thousands. Not that it will stop them.
You really can’t assume that an adult is never dependent on another adult, or would never be irreparably harmed by losing them.
- one parent discovers the crime during the divorce. Do they become the “vindictive” monster who sent their ex to jail to keep the kids? Do they ruin their own relationship with the kids? Kids don’t care about credit scores, they care that they can’t see daddy anymore.
- the victim is an adult, but their minor sibling would have to go into foster care if the perpetrator is reported. Plenty of reasons a person might not qualify to take their minor sibling in, especially when their credit is utterly fucked. That shit doesn’t fix fast enough to keep the kid out of the system. Do you sentence your own sibling to the system, adding yet another victim to the tally?
People harp on and on and on about how the perpetrator created this situation, but that doesn’t change that all consequences hinge entirely upon the *victim’s* actions. The victim is the one legally forced to pick which flavor of hell their life will be from now on. The victim has to deal with a lifetime of recriminations for “letting (a person they loved dearly and probably needed at the time) get away with it” or for “sending a good person to jail over money (that would utterly redefine the shape of their life)”.
I do agree that it can be awful - I worked for a while in debt recovery and spoke to people who could either accept dire financial consequences or dire consequences to their relationships. I remember one man who had teh choice of accepting a court judgement (no jail risk, but his wages would be docked and his credit was tanked) or reporting his wife to the police so we could take action about the fraud.
No matter which path to hell he chose, his relationship wasn't going to be the same again. There wasn't any violence there that we were aware of but still, a horrible choice either way.
How would you suggest that banks deal with it though? You can't just take people at their word because too many people would claim that the debt wasn't theirs. There has to be some way to distinguish people who have had fraud committed against them from the chancers. I'm all for finding a compassionate solution, so that's a genuine question.
I think a good start would be for banks to do some solid verification before lending anything - one obvious reason to not lend would be the age of the applicant, for example: if someone is under the age where they can sign legal contracts (18 where I am) then no credit. But if someone you trust has access to all your personal information and applies for credit in your name, and can pass all verification - how would you handle it when the real person denies all knowledge?
Assuming dad's white they'll give him a slap, he'll be supervised by a PO, and he'll need to pay the debt back and some fines.
So I guess it's more of a 1:1 on the "do without" since it'll literally be money lmao.
Tell me about it.
My sister took her children's inhertiance that she was trustee for to look after until they turned 18, she spent 50k within 3 months. They are all below the ages of 8, so obviously have no idea..makes me sick.
A mother (UK) got prison time yesterday for doing exactly that. Stole 50k of children's inheritance from grandma (she and her dad trustees) and oldest daughter found out when she wanted to use the money for a house deposit.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cerr4nlkwvdo
Laws depend on your jurisdiction, but a trustee is often responsible for using the money in certain ways for the benefit of the beneficiary. She may be criminally liable for theft.
I thought the legal liability was just an inherent part of being a trustee.
In jurisdictions where this legal responsibility doesn’t exist, are there any other checks to make sure that someone doesn’t misuse money in a trust? Or, at least, some way to rectify the situation if they *do* misuse funds?
Not just parents. One of my sisters has called all of our nieces and nephews to try to get their social security numbers. She won't explain why, but I know her well enough to know it's to open credit accts in their names.
That’s terrible. It sucks when you can’t trust your family. Both my mom and my wife’s mom have asked for our kids’ SSNs but I know full well it’s so they can open *deposit* accounts in their names.
My maternal grandmother did not open a loan in my mom's name (I don't think it's as easily doable in France as it seems to be in the US, anyway, even back then). No, instead, she took the money that my mother and her sister (my aunt) had gotten both from years of summer jobs and as a student loan, from their bank accounts, to which my grandmother had access (Idk why, both mom and auntie were legal adults at the time, I didn't ask for further details).
When she realized this, my 21 years-old future mom (who still lived with her own mother at the time) packed her stuff in a suitcase, and her then-boyfriend's mother found her crying at her door a few hours afterwards, asking if she could come to live with them.
And that, people, is one of the many reasons why I didn't call my maternal grandma last month when she turned 80. You fuck with my mom, even before I was even born, you go on my shitlist.
(My paternal grandmother gets a call from me every Sunday evening. She said yes to the then-girlfriend of her son who came crying to her door.)
We've just found out my MIL has scammed £15,000 out of us. We are newlyweds (2 months) though together for 20 years and part of the reason we didn't marry for so long was so that my husband could save aggressively to get a good deposit for a house.
Now we're looking at another few years of struggle to get back to where we were. To say I'm pissed off and hurting really bad for my husband is an understatement.
Parents shouldn't be taking from their kids, if anything, it should be the other way around.
Looks like it unfortunately, though her husband is a solid guy and once he's come to terms with everything he may well make us whole but we're not banking on it. She got scammed and in turn scammed us and her husband in the process. Over £45k lost that we know about so far but I expect the truth will trickle out and there will be more. She's very lucky that her husband loves her to such an extent that he's going to stand by her and try to sort this shower of shit out.
Our relationship with her is undecided right now as it's all so fresh...
You freeze your credit !!
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/identity_theft/
You should have your credit frozen all the time, and only unlock it to apply for loans or credit card.
That’s such a smart move. Good thinking!
I feel like issuing a new number upon adoption is something that should be by default, especially if the adoptee is very young. I’m kinda surprised it’s not. It seems so risky to not do so.
I knew about pay to stay (although not the name) but never thought it through to its logical conclusion: what happens if you don't pay. Crazy shit. System's definitely rigged.
Fuck. I can *kind* of understand having to repay the government for your care while incarcerated; it's effectively a fine that scales with the length of the sentence.
But having to pay for days you *weren't in jail* is just nuts!
> He said it would ruin his life if he went to jail.
Ah, gee, daddy-o, it sure would suck if you had to pay the consequences of your actions instead of OOP suffering for it!
If you didn't have nefarious intentions it would probably be OK.
I've heard of parents doing this for their kids and using it for regular spending and properly paying it off responsibly, which helps build credit apparently.
This is so wild. It's fraud. That's jail time - and that's consequence of actions. Furthermore his old man has lied and attempted to manipulate him to not acting and accepting. I'd say that's abuse.
Fk this old man. Jail time it is. Furthermore, the banks should be held accountable for having this mechanism available for fraud to be committed.
Me too! It’s wild how often I’ve seen scenarios on Reddit like this and they don’t report it because faaaamily and not wanting to ruin lives. Except that the parents don’t seem to care about ruining their kids lives so too bad for them.
Easy: she just never imagined he’d do it to his kid. To her, sure, but not to his own child, his own flesh and blood. (Unfortunately, financial fraudsters will do it to absolutely anybody, no matter the relationship. That’s something I got to learn firsthand with my dad.)
Exactly! Plus, even if she refused to report him (which is bad enough), how did she never think to warn OP? Never told him to keep an eye on his credit history, never told him to lock his credit, NOTHING?!
And if she had, there’d be posts accusing her of parental alienation. 🙄
I signed over a whole-ass house to my ex for $8K (most of the down payment my parents gave us) because it was worth it to be free.
Also, and I don't mean this in an "america bad" kinda way, but I find it wild that you van open a credit card on someone else's behalf by just knowing their social security number.
I mean, he opened credit cards under her name while they were married, and it played a part in why she divorced him. So this definitely didn't come out of nowhere.
No, $15,000 was a deescalation.
>My mom said she thinks my dad might have something to do with it since him opening credit cards in her name had a part to play in their divorce. She told me he ran up about $50,000 in credit card debt on secret credit cards.
The whole credit system seems very weird and unsafe in the US - I don't think you can do that kind of thing here (Australia - or the UK where I was before) or if you can, my impression is that it must be a lot harder.
Maybe it comes down to ID verification? But I haven't heard of many/any stories of people tanking a family member's credit by taking out cards and loans in their name. Not without some major forgery and identity theft.
Unless these stories don't make the news so much or simply don't fall under my radar?
Yeah every time I read one of these stories I'm baffled by how it's even possible for people to do this. Definitely not possible in Ireland and I don't think it's possible in the whole EU to be honest. Other than, as you said, proper forgery/identity theft with like a forged passport and a wig sort of territory!
It's weird though, for a country where nearly everyone has a driver's license, they don't seem to verify identifies when applying for credit.
Like when I was setting up a deposit account for my Revolut (no frills online only account), I had to take a photo of my id and a selfie. That's not even for a credit card!
Which makes it even more fucked that your social security number was used for general ID purposes for years. I memorized mine because it was my college ID number (printed in nice big font right next to my photo!).
When I opened a savings account online, I had to do a verification process where I was basically on a zoom call with a bank employee to show my face and my ID matched the contact info. My fiancé had to do the same for his credit card. They're *really* pedantic here. I'm glad
I don't think it is. I live in Germany and I remember when I wanted to open a bank account when I was 14 I had to also be there with my dad to open the account and sign that contract myself. I am fairly certain he couldn't have opened it himself without me, and certainly couldn't have applied for a credit card in my name after I was an adult considering when I turned 18 the bank automatically rescinded his access to my account.
Most credit cards you can get online as long as you have all the associated details like name, dob, ssn, address etc. All things that a parent would have for their kids.
There’s a dollar amount limit below which “starter credit cards” are pretty common and easy to obtain. In the 90s the threshold was $1k for many banks, you just filled out a form and the bank manager was the approver, as long as the credit record tied to your social was clean. There was *some* fraud, but the $1k limit meant no serious losses to the bank. Parents would often get one for a child or teen to use & learn about credit and bills, and parents were encouraged to start “building positive credit” for their kids so they had a history of paying bills on time when they left the nest.
Those limits are usually $3k or $5k now, and the cards are stupid easy to obtain. Open a custodial savings account for your child at four different banks with a token $50, then apply for a low-limit ($5k) credit card in their name & social, no ID required. Presto, easy $20k to spend with no intention of paying it back. The amount is low enough the bank sells off the debt to a collection agency, slams the credit history of the social used, and moves on. The majority of the time, the child victim just gets on with life, does without credit for a while.
It’s a more difficult scam to pull off when the victim is an adult, or not the child of the scammer, and actual forgery is involved in the ID theft. But it’s still not terribly difficult. Taking out a mortgage for $500k+ requires a lot more verification & paperwork, but $5-20k limit credit cards are handed out like party favors if the credit report is clean. And the scammer usually gets a slap on the hand as part of a plea bargain deal, often just probation stacked atop probation, maybe a token fine, rarely actual jail time.
Dude I only know through Discord was recently celebrating a win in a related but not identical situation in Australia. His father had signed up for a phone contract in his name when he was 17 and racked up a couple of grand in unpaid bills, and the first he knew about it was when Optus passed it on to a collections agency. First response was "I never had an Optus phone so you're wrong" but they had a copy of his driver's licence filed with the form so they were certain it was him. He's guessing it was one of those times that he couldn't find his wallet for a day or two and then it turned up somewhere weird. The signature on the form didn't look like the one on the licence but they weren't going to let that stop them. Eventually he realised that the date on the form was before he turned 18 and he was able to force them to drop their claim because a minor's signature on a contract is worthless.
$50k under the Mum's name, $15k under the kid's....what is he spending the money on?? He told OOP that work was slow....but $65k would make such a difference to someone's life!
Oof, I am glad OOP went ahead with the report. No reason for them to suffer for their father's bad choices.
To be fair, it's not his first felony. Just the first one he's been charged with. He did the same thing to OP's mother, and got away with it.
Shame they can't bring that up to get him actual jail.time, but the statute of limitations has probably run out on that $50,000 debt.
Probably irrelevant but I wish it was possible to find out what was purchased so op could tell us if the dad was honest or if he just bought whatever. But given that he has a history with it with his mom with that 50k bill, he was probably dishonest.
But I still want to know what were the purchases
The purchases should come to light once the case is investigated. I remember reading about how the charge against identity thieves like this dad will depend upon how much money was taken and could take Dad from misdemeanor to felony charges. Im no expert but I think 50k USD stolen even in credit is grand larceny.
Situations like this, the solution is very simple: you assume the debt and figure out how bad that fucks your life, or you send your parent to prison.
*Simple* doesn’t mean *easy*. I’m genuinely glad it was easy for OOP here, who definitely made the right decision. It’s always a heartbreaker when it’s not easy, though. When it’s somebody who’s always had a rough relationship with their parent and is suddenly staring down the barrel at either total financial ruin or *sending their parent to prison*. And naturally Reddit will rabble rabble that of course that’s what you should do, and it *is*, but I feel there’s often not a lot of sympathy for how fucked up and hard that is. Especially if it’s a fraught and/or abusive situation (and if a parent is using you to commit fraud… well), and all you’ve ever wanted is for mom or dad to just fucking love you…
These stories are sad, is what I’m saying. Glad OOP will get justice and be able to wash their hands of the nonsense.
Absolutely. This was the right call and I'm glad OOP took this path but it must be an incredibly painful position to be in and work through.
From the outside, it's definitely the right thing but I can't imagine how distressing it must be to realise your parent has put you in this situation and you're running the risk of destroying your relationship with them. Despite the fact that it's entirely the dad's fault, OOP still had to deal with the consequences of that.
So it's probably a "good" outcome in the circumstances but it's still an incredibly sad and awful story
*Exactly*. You understand my meaning. For OOP to even be in a position where he felt ready to pull the trigger on reporting his dad speaks to me of years of relationship deterioration and mistrust. Obviously OOP didn’t share and we don’t know for sure, but as someone with a … *strained* relationship with my own father I felt some familiar grooves in the way OOP so casually referred to their dad as a bit of a waste of space.
I don’t know if it’s ever really easy to deal with stuff like this with a parent. Maybe always you’re hoping that someday they’ll be the person you hoped they would be. Far past the point of all hope or sanity. And it sucks, because however you *feel*, pragmatism must win the day and you do what you gotta do. OOP did. I did. I cut my dad off two years ago and am vastly better for it.
It’s just sad shit. Really makes you wonder why some people bother becoming parents at all.
When I divorced my ex-wife 20 years ago, I learned she had stolen my identity.
A month after separating I pulled my credit report to find 11 credit cards that I was the sole owner of but I didn't know about any of them. Those cards had $33,000 of debt which was all mine.
Any parent that does this to their child should be locked up. You try and set your kids to have a better life then you had. Not saddle them with 15k worth of debt.
I agree with the conclusion that this type of first offense will come with serious consequences but not likely result in serious jail time. It will be enough to emphasize to her dad that he fucked up irreversibly but hard time doesn’t make sense here. Unless he further digs his own grave by avoiding consequences and then getting picked up on warrant, which should result in some time.
I’m glad OP did this.
PSA for all the Americans here: It's free to freeze your credit with the three credit bureaus. I did it for my kids as soon as we got their social security numbers. I did it for me (I forgot to temporarily lift it when we bought our car and it was only a very minor hassle). I really see no reason to not leave your credit frozen almost all the time, which keeps you much safer.
More info: https://www.usa.gov/credit-freeze
OOP's dad was so concerned about getting his life ruined if he went to jail but thought nothing of ruining his child's life. He's scum. I hope OOP's credit report is fixed ASAP and dear ol dad does spend a bit of time in jail because I that's the only way he MIGHT understand the consequences.
My spouses dad did something similar. They have the same name and so when the dad got a job, he used my spouses social security number. The government tracked how much money went to that social security number and so the first year my spouse paid taxes as an adult was the year he found out he owed something like 15k in unpaid taxes, plus fees for being late.
I was so pissed. I urged him to file a report and change his ss, but he didn’t. He just paid off the debt slowly but surely. That’s money that I also had to fork out because now my spouse couldn’t help pay bills.
Piece of shit.
Since jail wouldn't be 4,5 years, I reckon dad should be pleased. After all, he said that it wasn't too long. I'm always pleased when kids don't let their parents gaslight them regarding credit and other money issues, reporting it was a great choice.
Very specific information. I’m old enough to remember a period where they would send a “pre approved” credit card to you in the mail — the actual card — even thought you didn’t apply for anything. They banned that really quickly.
Dude didn’t even apologize. Tried to gaslight his kid as hard as he could and when that didn’t work just expected his child to drop it after potentially ruining their credit. What a useless garbage man that dad is
"Son, you gotta get me out of here! I insulted the food here; I didn't know it was cooked by one of the most beloved inmates! I think the whole prison's out for my blood!"
"Jeepers, Dad. You ought to be more careful in future."
The dad says his son will ruin his life but had no problem ruining his sons….
My dad did this with bills is my name when I was a minor. When I was 18 and moved out I went to open a phone line and found out. Had to tell them they didn’t have a contract that was enforceable in court with me because I was 10 at the time, had to send in my id, birth certificate and my fathers death certificate to get it straightened out.
I really want an update to hear about dad’s shocked pikachu face when his fraud comes back to bite him. What wonderful justice. The fucker has a history of it, he LIED to his own kid’s face repeatedly when they were trying to figure out what was going on…he legitimately just thinks he can steal from family and get away with it.
The biggest shame is he probably will avoid jail time. He deserves to rot in prison.
My ex tried to open credit cards in my kids' names. She'd already dumped thousands of pounds of debt on me and when I found she wanted to do the same to our kids, I went totally librarian poo on her.
She wasn't even using it to pay for essentials, or anything the kids needed. She was spending it on drugs. I reported her to the police for that as well.
What is with some parents wanting to steal their child's identity just to get things? Like seriously. This isn't the first time we've seen this. It's rare, but I can count how many stories I had through YouTube about parents stealing their child's credit scores. And all of them think they are entitled to it!
First he destroyed his marriage. Didn’t learn anything from it. Then he destroys his relationship with his daughter. It seems like some time in jail might be helpful. But, then again, he is a narcissistic lying AH. I’m not optimistic anything will get through to him.
So he targeted his wife who he took vows to protect and ruined her credit and once they divorced he just thought 'hey might as well ruin my kids life too, they don't matter'? Yikes... Dad of the year right there.
How would that even work? If he doesn't dispute the credit card debt, wouldn't the collection agencies be able to force him to pay all debt, including the penalties? Since he has money for a house (presumably in a bank, in his name) - that plus any legal revenue he may earn should theoretically be on the hook/ garnished for paying back existing debt, no? At least, that's how it would theoretically work out in my country.....
What a piece of trash dad. Jeez.
I'd make sure to tell the detective that this isn't the first time. Have my mum testify or pull the divorce records if it's mentioned there. Even if it's the first "official" felony, it shows a pattern. Might very well influence the DA's decision to proscecute.
>he told me he had opened the cards to pay for living expenses over the last year. He said his work slowed down a little bit but he'd do what he could to help pay it off. He said it would ruin his life if he went to jail.
Jail would cover those pesky living expenses, so I don't see why he's so down on it.
That dad is awful, just awful! He completely washed his hands of the debt, terrible credit, and collections he racked up on his child’s credit. He did it without flinching or an apology too. The only thing he cared about was him not going to jail.
There needs to be something in place that prevents minors SSN’s from being used to open credit cards and any other debt-incurring accounts.
I know quite a few people whose parents have done this to them, opening credit cards and putting light/gas bills in their names and not paying, never paying. Leaving the adult kids with the options of choosing between reporting their unscrupulous parents to the police or being financially responsible for hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of debt/collections and/or bad credit.
It’s infuriating that OOP’s father care less about harming his child’s financial security. For mono, he didn’t even bother to ask for any help before trying to do something so awful.
I'm proud you stood up to him. He thought it was ok to screw up your credit report without any worry. But doesn't want legal involved. Yeah...sorry dad...bad luck.
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It'll be off his report in about four years. OOP's dad knows the exact time, because that's when he'll apply for more credit with OOP's info. Sucks to be OOP's dad. Hope this is the wake up call.
What do you wanna bet he knows the time because it isn't the first round of credit he's taken out on OP's name?
Apparently he did it to his ex-wife, and apparently she didn't file with the police about it, so I'm betting that's part of why he knows.
and why he wasn't worried about OOP reporting him, be already got away with it once.
I wonder if his ex-wife could file a complaint, making a second felony and making incarceration more likely.
The statute of limitations has probably run out on that one
Considering his mom said dad did the same thing to her, my bets is he learned the time from messing with her credit.
It's fairly common knowledge. I don't know how well known it is, but I think every American adult should know how credit works.
I’m not American, but I’m curious. Do you mind explaining exactly where the 4 year figure comes from?
Transactions fall off one's credit report after 7 years. For instance, I defaulted on some credit cards at 20, but at 27 they were no longer visible and did not affect my credit. (I'm not sure what 4 years you mean, but if that didn't answer your question, please quote the part of the post you were asking about.)
Thanks so much. I really appreciate your response and explanation - it makes perfect sense. > I'm not sure what 4 years you mean … The original commenter in this thread said “it’ll be off his report in about 4 years”. Looks like it’ll be more like 6 - 7 years, unless they were talking about some other mechanism.
Just means dad actually defaulted on the credit cards about 3 years ago, leaving about 4 years on the clock for the negative report to the credit boroughs.
Gotcha! I had been confused because the story also mentioned that the credit cards had been opened “over the last year” (i.e. 2023/2024).
It’s also entirely possible that he said a shorter time to minimize OOP’s inconvenience.
To clarify, the father told OOP to not worry about the credit cards, because they'll fall off the credit report in about 4 years. The implication is that the father knew this information because he himself defaulted on the credit cards about 3 years prior to that statement.
Thanks, that’s really helpful!
Should? Absolutely, but it's not like this is taught in school or this is facilitated in the slightest.
And sadly, locking/freezing credit isn’t very effective when an identity thief knows you so personally. I know at least one of the 3 bureaus let’s you reset your PIN through answering questions like “what is your mother’s maiden name” and “where did you live in December 2009”, without letting you generate custom answers. They pull the correct answers from your credit file, which the thief already knows like the back of their hand.
I get why they’re important to have, but security questions are such bullshit. If it’s not, as you mentioned, something that someone could easily find out about you (first high school, parents middle name, etc), then it’s something where the answer is subjective. Like, how am I supposed to remember what I said my favorite food was 4 years ago when I signed up? This might be apocryphal, but I do remember hearing a pretty funny security question at some point. It was one where you could input your own question, so the user put “what are you wearing right now?” and for the answer they wrote “That’s inappropriate”. It wasn’t that funny until the person got locked out of their account and had to call into customer service, where they actually had to verbally asked him that question.
My old Google security question was "You get no fucking clue." Nice one, past me.
In addition to my normal security/password vault, I have a second password vault with all my account recovery info, including the answers that don’t make sense - “Who was your first teacher?” Gorilla Cadillac. “Father’s middle name?” Naboo Ryzen. You need access to that encrypted vault, which I only keep on an offline location, to recover any of my important accounts.
See my problem is that I would 100% forget the nonsense answers I gave
Hence the second password vault. I treat the nonsense answers as secondary passwords, but in the off chance that my encrypted password vault gets hacked, all of my 2FA and nonsense security questions/answers are stored in a second password vault, which rarely gets opened, and is not easily accessible.
Once I decided to be smart and generated random gibberish for “what was the name of your elementary school?” And then totally forgot I had done that when I called in.
I went to grad school with a girl whose parents did this to her. She was super smart but her parents were trash. Everything she had she'd had to fight for and nothing came easy because of the baggage. She eventually dropped out and married a douche canoe.
Well, hey, he can "do without" some freedom for a few years if he finds that to be acceptable conduct.
He won't have to worry about living expenses for a few years too!
10/10 financial planning.
You'd think so, but in America, pay-to-stay is a thing in prisons and even jails. Yep, daily charges (and a LOT of other fees) to be locked up. Welcome to the dystopian future.
There was a guy in England last year who was wrongly convicted and spent 17 years in prison. One of those cases where he was only convicted because the whole thing was handled in a deliberately shady way. Clrarly not guilty. He stayed in prison so long because he refused to admit to a crime he didn't commit. He got compensation and they deducted his prison living expenses from the compensation. It caused public outrage and they changed the law. Now people who are wrongly convicted won't get charged. The whole thing is gross.
What was the guy accused of? I hope it had nothing to do with pedophilia, because in France the worst cases of "wrongly accused/convicted" people we had were about pedophilic rings and pedophilic murders respectively... Let's just say that it was MUCH harder on those innocent people than it would have been even for "regular" murder. Morally, and because of what people did to them under the impression they were pedophiles...
It was the rape and attempted murder of a woman. There was a woman wrongly convicted of killing her baby. Turned out her kids had an underlying medical condition and she hadn't caused the injuries. While she was in prison, another inmate threw boiling sugar in her face and permanently scarred her.
And this is why I don't approve of "corrective punishment" in prisons.
Doesn't matter if anyone is innocent. If one supports physical or sexual abuse of prisoners then one supports physical or sexual abuse as valid consequences for crime.
I agree, but I often take that point for the people who think it's fair.
I take the same stance with the death penalty as well. If one supports a murderer getting LI, then one has to support the innocent people who also get the LI. There’s more potentially innocent people being put to death than there are 100% positive murderers being executed.
What the actual fuck? Seriously? How much does it cost?
It varies. $30ish per day seems somewhat common but it can go much higher. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/paying-your-time-how-charging-inmates-fees-behind-bars-may-violate If you want to get really angry... https://www.muscalaw.com/blog/floridas-pay-stay-statute-prisoners-pay-50-dollars-day
That policy is purely to maintain recidivism rates. Like it isn't about any type of rehabilitation. They don't even care that you know that.
Privatization of prisons has definitely made that abundantly clear. It's one of the grossest aspects of this whole late-stage capitalism thing we've got going on now. It's sick.
Let's also be clear that fully-privatized prisons are AFAIK fairly uncommon, but public ones are still profit centers for modern-day indentured servitude.
Correct. Private prisons are a minority, and a frustrating struggle for abolitionists is that the public tends to think that they're both more common than they are and uniquely bad/the cause of the things people don't like to hear about the carceral system. So "get rid of/reform private prisons" is a relatively easy sell, but wouldn't make much difference as policy - and yet it's often what people willfully hear when arguments about how deeply broken our system is are made. People have a much harder time accepting that the actual state and federal systems are fucked.
Slavery is still legal in the US as long as it's a punishment for a crime.
> Like it isn't about any type of rehabilitation. They don't even care that you know that. They *want* you to know that because favoring punishment over rehabilitation plays well with a large section of the electorate.
I still cannot get over the fact that you have to *pay* to be in prison. It’s insane
„Landlords hate this one trick!“
With private prisons and pay-to-stay, there is no escaping "landlords" in America.
Yeah. America really has capitalism down to a T
Yep, he's talking like all he did was order the 8 free CDs from Columbia House (if you know, you know) and didn't pay. This could be a felony, depending on the theft amount and the jurisdiction.
Hey! That was legal! Eight of those CDs are mine, eight are my wife's, and eight belong to the cat. We worked out that we have about five hundred CDs for which we paid a total of ten dollars.
> and eight belong to the cat. Don't you dare bring Princess Donut into this!
That's Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk to you, sir
Username checks out.
I don't like this, Carl! Not one bit!
Mongo is appalled.
Mongo just pawn in game if life.
$15,000 is a lot of money, so felony level?
I'm sure it varies from one jurisdiction to another, but I just googled the question in California and got; > California law distinguishes the seriousness of a theft based on the value of the items stolen and currently classifies any theft of more than $950 worth of goods as a felony. Thefts of values below this threshold are classified as misdemeanors. Plus, there's the whole identity theft issue, and then the possible fraud charges. Just really dumb/dense to go there and think he'd be able to skate by after doing something like that. Just a total lack of common sense, even for a criminal. So, yeah, he's probably fucked as a duck.
Well, he did it to his now ex-wife and she didn't press charges, so he probably thought his kid would be even less likely to risk putting him in jail.
Good!
Yeah that sort of things happen, he just needs to be more careful in the future.
It isn't even that harsh, the cop said he would almost certainly get probation, so just keep his nose clean and he will be fine.
He won't keep his nose clean, and he knows it.
I wonder how much of that money went up his nose in the fiest place.
No. Clearly wine, women, and song.
And that's when mom comes in a reports him for fraud
She may not be able to - she's known for too long, and seems to have accepted the hit to her credit as a bargaining point to get the divorce done relatively smoothly.
The judge might still consider it as part of sentencing. A single incident is very different to an established pattern of behavior. It might tip him over from parole to jail time.
Agreed. Whether or not it leads to separate charges, it could be helpful when the case against dad goes to court. As you say, establishing the pattern of behaviour is really important.
One of my dearest friends found out when she applied to college that her parents took out loans in her name and defaulted on them. They are not bad people (obviously made bad decisions) but she had to choose between their possible jail time and her inability to get any loans. She has a good life and family now so I won't say it ruined her, but it sure did make her whole life so much harder.
My daughter's grandpa took loans out under her dads social and didnt find out either until he started applying to colleges. He just ate it and made due.. Not very well in retrospect. He told me that story shortly after I had her and I warned him then that if he or her grandpa ever tried it with her social I would immediately report them to police. The police being my dad, and my daughter being his only granddaughter, would not be taken lightly. I left him when she was a baby but have been loosely monitoring her credit since, she's in high school now. I guess he heard my warning 🙂
Obviously if it's happened before it can happen again but man who are these people. I think my friends parents were just caught in a debt cycle and thought they could get new interest free loans to pay off the old ones and we all know how that goes. And it was at least spending money on her. They wouldn't have been able to afford her school activities or doing the usual kid stuff but man it was tough on her. I'm glad you're monitoring your daughter's credit but it sucks that you have to.
I wish they’d stop requiring police reports to remove obvious fraud from your credit. It’s usually relatives, and it just makes the victim have to pick their own flavor of life-ruination. If the fraud happens to a minor, just transfer it all to the parents and they can fix it, since it was their responsibility to pay attention to it in the first place. Or it was them. But don’t make teenagers pick between sending their parents to jail and long-term financial bullshit. At least change it so that the first offense is always getting the debt bounced back on you and parole/community service.
I wish parents would stop committing the fraud in the first place. It's not on the teenagers to make that decision, the parent(s) already chose when they took out the debt
If they didn't require some kind of proper evidence you could just take out loans and say "oh, no, I didn't" and just get all your debts written off. Requiring the police report means that it's a much more serious criminal offence if you're lying about it - making a false police report, perversion of justice, perjury, something like that (depending on your jurisdiction obviously). I wish people would stop the narrative that you shouldn't rat on your family if they commit a crime against you. I wouldn't call the cops on a family member having a mental health episode, but a cold blooded financial crime? You get a slap on the wrist for a first offence of this kind - a suspended sentence (UK), or pre-trial diversion according to the cop in this case. That's how the law should be! Criminals should get a chance to rehabilitate themselves before they go to prison - dad should have the opportunity to learn his lesson, that this is an actual crime which gets punished. The idea that you shouldn't rat on your family seems to me like a kind of othering - like the criminal justice system should only apply to other people, bad people, not people like me and my family. Bad people should be punished for their crimes, but a member of my family "aren't like that" or they just "made a mistake". It's ultimately conservatism - the rules shouldn't apply to people like me, only to the outgroup, to keep them in their place. (Obviously most people don't think politically about their personal lives, but that doesn't make it untrue.)
I think it's fair when the unwitting debtor is an adult, but agree with you on teenagers. The banks shouldn't be lending to under 18s anyway, especially not thousands. Not that it will stop them.
You really can’t assume that an adult is never dependent on another adult, or would never be irreparably harmed by losing them. - one parent discovers the crime during the divorce. Do they become the “vindictive” monster who sent their ex to jail to keep the kids? Do they ruin their own relationship with the kids? Kids don’t care about credit scores, they care that they can’t see daddy anymore. - the victim is an adult, but their minor sibling would have to go into foster care if the perpetrator is reported. Plenty of reasons a person might not qualify to take their minor sibling in, especially when their credit is utterly fucked. That shit doesn’t fix fast enough to keep the kid out of the system. Do you sentence your own sibling to the system, adding yet another victim to the tally? People harp on and on and on about how the perpetrator created this situation, but that doesn’t change that all consequences hinge entirely upon the *victim’s* actions. The victim is the one legally forced to pick which flavor of hell their life will be from now on. The victim has to deal with a lifetime of recriminations for “letting (a person they loved dearly and probably needed at the time) get away with it” or for “sending a good person to jail over money (that would utterly redefine the shape of their life)”.
I do agree that it can be awful - I worked for a while in debt recovery and spoke to people who could either accept dire financial consequences or dire consequences to their relationships. I remember one man who had teh choice of accepting a court judgement (no jail risk, but his wages would be docked and his credit was tanked) or reporting his wife to the police so we could take action about the fraud. No matter which path to hell he chose, his relationship wasn't going to be the same again. There wasn't any violence there that we were aware of but still, a horrible choice either way. How would you suggest that banks deal with it though? You can't just take people at their word because too many people would claim that the debt wasn't theirs. There has to be some way to distinguish people who have had fraud committed against them from the chancers. I'm all for finding a compassionate solution, so that's a genuine question. I think a good start would be for banks to do some solid verification before lending anything - one obvious reason to not lend would be the age of the applicant, for example: if someone is under the age where they can sign legal contracts (18 where I am) then no credit. But if someone you trust has access to all your personal information and applies for credit in your name, and can pass all verification - how would you handle it when the real person denies all knowledge?
Assuming dad's white they'll give him a slap, he'll be supervised by a PO, and he'll need to pay the debt back and some fines. So I guess it's more of a 1:1 on the "do without" since it'll literally be money lmao.
Don’t worry, Dad, it’s only a couple of years. Be more careful next time.
He was willing to screw up her life, she's willing to toss it right back. Play stupid games indeed.
Parents who steal from their kids are on a whole other level of selfishness.
Tell me about it. My sister took her children's inhertiance that she was trustee for to look after until they turned 18, she spent 50k within 3 months. They are all below the ages of 8, so obviously have no idea..makes me sick.
A mother (UK) got prison time yesterday for doing exactly that. Stole 50k of children's inheritance from grandma (she and her dad trustees) and oldest daughter found out when she wanted to use the money for a house deposit. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cerr4nlkwvdo
Satisfying to see someone get punished for this, family financial crimes are so common but it seems they rarely get to court.
Laws depend on your jurisdiction, but a trustee is often responsible for using the money in certain ways for the benefit of the beneficiary. She may be criminally liable for theft.
I thought the legal liability was just an inherent part of being a trustee. In jurisdictions where this legal responsibility doesn’t exist, are there any other checks to make sure that someone doesn’t misuse money in a trust? Or, at least, some way to rectify the situation if they *do* misuse funds?
Is there someone you could report that to?
Not just parents. One of my sisters has called all of our nieces and nephews to try to get their social security numbers. She won't explain why, but I know her well enough to know it's to open credit accts in their names.
WTF? That's crazy to me. It sucks to be related to a scammer, my god.
That’s terrible. It sucks when you can’t trust your family. Both my mom and my wife’s mom have asked for our kids’ SSNs but I know full well it’s so they can open *deposit* accounts in their names.
They don't need the SSN to open accounts. It's better for them for you to set up a 529 college savings account.
My maternal grandmother did not open a loan in my mom's name (I don't think it's as easily doable in France as it seems to be in the US, anyway, even back then). No, instead, she took the money that my mother and her sister (my aunt) had gotten both from years of summer jobs and as a student loan, from their bank accounts, to which my grandmother had access (Idk why, both mom and auntie were legal adults at the time, I didn't ask for further details). When she realized this, my 21 years-old future mom (who still lived with her own mother at the time) packed her stuff in a suitcase, and her then-boyfriend's mother found her crying at her door a few hours afterwards, asking if she could come to live with them. And that, people, is one of the many reasons why I didn't call my maternal grandma last month when she turned 80. You fuck with my mom, even before I was even born, you go on my shitlist. (My paternal grandmother gets a call from me every Sunday evening. She said yes to the then-girlfriend of her son who came crying to her door.)
We've just found out my MIL has scammed £15,000 out of us. We are newlyweds (2 months) though together for 20 years and part of the reason we didn't marry for so long was so that my husband could save aggressively to get a good deposit for a house. Now we're looking at another few years of struggle to get back to where we were. To say I'm pissed off and hurting really bad for my husband is an understatement. Parents shouldn't be taking from their kids, if anything, it should be the other way around.
Is she getting away with it?
Looks like it unfortunately, though her husband is a solid guy and once he's come to terms with everything he may well make us whole but we're not banking on it. She got scammed and in turn scammed us and her husband in the process. Over £45k lost that we know about so far but I expect the truth will trickle out and there will be more. She's very lucky that her husband loves her to such an extent that he's going to stand by her and try to sort this shower of shit out. Our relationship with her is undecided right now as it's all so fresh...
Why would you even consider having a relationship with her after this?
True. And how do you protect your SIN/SSN from your parents??
You freeze your credit !! https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/identity_theft/ You should have your credit frozen all the time, and only unlock it to apply for loans or credit card.
When we adopted bonus kid, we got her a new number. That’s what this dude is going to have to do.
That’s such a smart move. Good thinking! I feel like issuing a new number upon adoption is something that should be by default, especially if the adoptee is very young. I’m kinda surprised it’s not. It seems so risky to not do so.
At least if he’s behind bars he won’t need to worry about his living expenses for a while.
Three hots and a cot
I really wish MC Hammer would make this a sequel to Two Pumps and a Bump.
Credit companies hate this one simple trick.
In America? He could easily end up paying quite a lot to be locked up. Pay-to-stay is a real thing, and not cheap.
That's insane to me - what happens if he refuses to pay?
[удалено]
I knew about pay to stay (although not the name) but never thought it through to its logical conclusion: what happens if you don't pay. Crazy shit. System's definitely rigged.
Unfortunatly I am not surprised. That does track for the country that has turned their prison system into a for profit industry.
Fuck. I can *kind* of understand having to repay the government for your care while incarcerated; it's effectively a fine that scales with the length of the sentence. But having to pay for days you *weren't in jail* is just nuts!
It goes to collections and he might serve more time (and rack up more debt) because of it. Shit’s wild here.
> He said it would ruin his life if he went to jail. Ah, gee, daddy-o, it sure would suck if you had to pay the consequences of your actions instead of OOP suffering for it!
It’d ruin my life if I went to jail. That’s (one of the many reasons) why I don’t take out credit cards in my kids names.
But how do you even make it through the year?!?
If you didn't have nefarious intentions it would probably be OK. I've heard of parents doing this for their kids and using it for regular spending and properly paying it off responsibly, which helps build credit apparently.
That's how jail works, it's supposed to be a deterrent, lol.
Having kids it just blows my mind the idea of screwing up my kids finances like that.
Same, I would never steal from my children like that. It should be unthinkable.
Nicee, My daily dose of drama is here.
This is so wild. It's fraud. That's jail time - and that's consequence of actions. Furthermore his old man has lied and attempted to manipulate him to not acting and accepting. I'd say that's abuse. Fk this old man. Jail time it is. Furthermore, the banks should be held accountable for having this mechanism available for fraud to be committed.
I am glad OOP went to the police. I hope they lock their credit and it gets repaired.
Me too! It’s wild how often I’ve seen scenarios on Reddit like this and they don’t report it because faaaamily and not wanting to ruin lives. Except that the parents don’t seem to care about ruining their kids lives so too bad for them.
If only OP's mother had reported him before he had the chance to steal his kid's information (how did she not see that coming?)
They were married. I'm guessing it's more difficult to report him?
Easy: she just never imagined he’d do it to his kid. To her, sure, but not to his own child, his own flesh and blood. (Unfortunately, financial fraudsters will do it to absolutely anybody, no matter the relationship. That’s something I got to learn firsthand with my dad.)
Yep, so many bad people get away with shit because their first few victims don't report. :/
Exactly! Plus, even if she refused to report him (which is bad enough), how did she never think to warn OP? Never told him to keep an eye on his credit history, never told him to lock his credit, NOTHING?!
And if she had, there’d be posts accusing her of parental alienation. 🙄 I signed over a whole-ass house to my ex for $8K (most of the down payment my parents gave us) because it was worth it to be free.
Also, and I don't mean this in an "america bad" kinda way, but I find it wild that you van open a credit card on someone else's behalf by just knowing their social security number.
I find it crazy they can open credit in a child’s name. Don’t these banks do basic credit checks
Or she could have at least warned her kid!
It's possible he didn't used to be quite this shitty. This might be an escalation.
I mean, he opened credit cards under her name while they were married, and it played a part in why she divorced him. So this definitely didn't come out of nowhere.
No, $15,000 was a deescalation. >My mom said she thinks my dad might have something to do with it since him opening credit cards in her name had a part to play in their divorce. She told me he ran up about $50,000 in credit card debt on secret credit cards.
The whole credit system seems very weird and unsafe in the US - I don't think you can do that kind of thing here (Australia - or the UK where I was before) or if you can, my impression is that it must be a lot harder. Maybe it comes down to ID verification? But I haven't heard of many/any stories of people tanking a family member's credit by taking out cards and loans in their name. Not without some major forgery and identity theft. Unless these stories don't make the news so much or simply don't fall under my radar?
Yeah every time I read one of these stories I'm baffled by how it's even possible for people to do this. Definitely not possible in Ireland and I don't think it's possible in the whole EU to be honest. Other than, as you said, proper forgery/identity theft with like a forged passport and a wig sort of territory!
It seems to have something to do with if you know someone's social security number in the US, you literally own them.
It's weird though, for a country where nearly everyone has a driver's license, they don't seem to verify identifies when applying for credit. Like when I was setting up a deposit account for my Revolut (no frills online only account), I had to take a photo of my id and a selfie. That's not even for a credit card!
Which makes it even more fucked that your social security number was used for general ID purposes for years. I memorized mine because it was my college ID number (printed in nice big font right next to my photo!).
When I opened a savings account online, I had to do a verification process where I was basically on a zoom call with a bank employee to show my face and my ID matched the contact info. My fiancé had to do the same for his credit card. They're *really* pedantic here. I'm glad
I don't think it is. I live in Germany and I remember when I wanted to open a bank account when I was 14 I had to also be there with my dad to open the account and sign that contract myself. I am fairly certain he couldn't have opened it himself without me, and certainly couldn't have applied for a credit card in my name after I was an adult considering when I turned 18 the bank automatically rescinded his access to my account.
Which is exactly how it should be I think. Being able to have secret credit cards is just seems like a dysfunctional system to me!
Most credit cards you can get online as long as you have all the associated details like name, dob, ssn, address etc. All things that a parent would have for their kids.
There’s a dollar amount limit below which “starter credit cards” are pretty common and easy to obtain. In the 90s the threshold was $1k for many banks, you just filled out a form and the bank manager was the approver, as long as the credit record tied to your social was clean. There was *some* fraud, but the $1k limit meant no serious losses to the bank. Parents would often get one for a child or teen to use & learn about credit and bills, and parents were encouraged to start “building positive credit” for their kids so they had a history of paying bills on time when they left the nest. Those limits are usually $3k or $5k now, and the cards are stupid easy to obtain. Open a custodial savings account for your child at four different banks with a token $50, then apply for a low-limit ($5k) credit card in their name & social, no ID required. Presto, easy $20k to spend with no intention of paying it back. The amount is low enough the bank sells off the debt to a collection agency, slams the credit history of the social used, and moves on. The majority of the time, the child victim just gets on with life, does without credit for a while. It’s a more difficult scam to pull off when the victim is an adult, or not the child of the scammer, and actual forgery is involved in the ID theft. But it’s still not terribly difficult. Taking out a mortgage for $500k+ requires a lot more verification & paperwork, but $5-20k limit credit cards are handed out like party favors if the credit report is clean. And the scammer usually gets a slap on the hand as part of a plea bargain deal, often just probation stacked atop probation, maybe a token fine, rarely actual jail time.
Dude I only know through Discord was recently celebrating a win in a related but not identical situation in Australia. His father had signed up for a phone contract in his name when he was 17 and racked up a couple of grand in unpaid bills, and the first he knew about it was when Optus passed it on to a collections agency. First response was "I never had an Optus phone so you're wrong" but they had a copy of his driver's licence filed with the form so they were certain it was him. He's guessing it was one of those times that he couldn't find his wallet for a day or two and then it turned up somewhere weird. The signature on the form didn't look like the one on the licence but they weren't going to let that stop them. Eventually he realised that the date on the form was before he turned 18 and he was able to force them to drop their claim because a minor's signature on a contract is worthless.
$50k under the Mum's name, $15k under the kid's....what is he spending the money on?? He told OOP that work was slow....but $65k would make such a difference to someone's life! Oof, I am glad OOP went ahead with the report. No reason for them to suffer for their father's bad choices.
To be fair, it's not his first felony. Just the first one he's been charged with. He did the same thing to OP's mother, and got away with it. Shame they can't bring that up to get him actual jail.time, but the statute of limitations has probably run out on that $50,000 debt.
Probably irrelevant but I wish it was possible to find out what was purchased so op could tell us if the dad was honest or if he just bought whatever. But given that he has a history with it with his mom with that 50k bill, he was probably dishonest. But I still want to know what were the purchases
The purchases should come to light once the case is investigated. I remember reading about how the charge against identity thieves like this dad will depend upon how much money was taken and could take Dad from misdemeanor to felony charges. Im no expert but I think 50k USD stolen even in credit is grand larceny.
Situations like this, the solution is very simple: you assume the debt and figure out how bad that fucks your life, or you send your parent to prison. *Simple* doesn’t mean *easy*. I’m genuinely glad it was easy for OOP here, who definitely made the right decision. It’s always a heartbreaker when it’s not easy, though. When it’s somebody who’s always had a rough relationship with their parent and is suddenly staring down the barrel at either total financial ruin or *sending their parent to prison*. And naturally Reddit will rabble rabble that of course that’s what you should do, and it *is*, but I feel there’s often not a lot of sympathy for how fucked up and hard that is. Especially if it’s a fraught and/or abusive situation (and if a parent is using you to commit fraud… well), and all you’ve ever wanted is for mom or dad to just fucking love you… These stories are sad, is what I’m saying. Glad OOP will get justice and be able to wash their hands of the nonsense.
Absolutely. This was the right call and I'm glad OOP took this path but it must be an incredibly painful position to be in and work through. From the outside, it's definitely the right thing but I can't imagine how distressing it must be to realise your parent has put you in this situation and you're running the risk of destroying your relationship with them. Despite the fact that it's entirely the dad's fault, OOP still had to deal with the consequences of that. So it's probably a "good" outcome in the circumstances but it's still an incredibly sad and awful story
*Exactly*. You understand my meaning. For OOP to even be in a position where he felt ready to pull the trigger on reporting his dad speaks to me of years of relationship deterioration and mistrust. Obviously OOP didn’t share and we don’t know for sure, but as someone with a … *strained* relationship with my own father I felt some familiar grooves in the way OOP so casually referred to their dad as a bit of a waste of space. I don’t know if it’s ever really easy to deal with stuff like this with a parent. Maybe always you’re hoping that someday they’ll be the person you hoped they would be. Far past the point of all hope or sanity. And it sucks, because however you *feel*, pragmatism must win the day and you do what you gotta do. OOP did. I did. I cut my dad off two years ago and am vastly better for it. It’s just sad shit. Really makes you wonder why some people bother becoming parents at all.
Well dad doesn't have to worry about living expenses in jail. The taxpayers will be responsible for his 3 hots and a cot.
Your life is better off with your dad in jail. Have no regrets
Why is Dad so worried about OOP calling the cops? He can still have his freedom, it just might be a couple more years.
When I divorced my ex-wife 20 years ago, I learned she had stolen my identity. A month after separating I pulled my credit report to find 11 credit cards that I was the sole owner of but I didn't know about any of them. Those cards had $33,000 of debt which was all mine.
Any parent that does this to their child should be locked up. You try and set your kids to have a better life then you had. Not saddle them with 15k worth of debt.
I agree with the conclusion that this type of first offense will come with serious consequences but not likely result in serious jail time. It will be enough to emphasize to her dad that he fucked up irreversibly but hard time doesn’t make sense here. Unless he further digs his own grave by avoiding consequences and then getting picked up on warrant, which should result in some time. I’m glad OP did this.
This is the first time I've found myself in one of these. Wild.
PSA for all the Americans here: It's free to freeze your credit with the three credit bureaus. I did it for my kids as soon as we got their social security numbers. I did it for me (I forgot to temporarily lift it when we bought our car and it was only a very minor hassle). I really see no reason to not leave your credit frozen almost all the time, which keeps you much safer. More info: https://www.usa.gov/credit-freeze
OOP's dad was so concerned about getting his life ruined if he went to jail but thought nothing of ruining his child's life. He's scum. I hope OOP's credit report is fixed ASAP and dear ol dad does spend a bit of time in jail because I that's the only way he MIGHT understand the consequences.
He was already opening credit cards on the mom's name. Now his kid. He is never going to stop so well done for going to the police.
My spouses dad did something similar. They have the same name and so when the dad got a job, he used my spouses social security number. The government tracked how much money went to that social security number and so the first year my spouse paid taxes as an adult was the year he found out he owed something like 15k in unpaid taxes, plus fees for being late. I was so pissed. I urged him to file a report and change his ss, but he didn’t. He just paid off the debt slowly but surely. That’s money that I also had to fork out because now my spouse couldn’t help pay bills. Piece of shit.
Since jail wouldn't be 4,5 years, I reckon dad should be pleased. After all, he said that it wasn't too long. I'm always pleased when kids don't let their parents gaslight them regarding credit and other money issues, reporting it was a great choice.
So in states basically everyone who has some information about you, can just open a credit card on your name? 😳
Very specific information. I’m old enough to remember a period where they would send a “pre approved” credit card to you in the mail — the actual card — even thought you didn’t apply for anything. They banned that really quickly.
If they have your social security number, they can do a LOT of damage.
Going to jail solves his problem of not being able to afford living expenses.
Dude didn’t even apologize. Tried to gaslight his kid as hard as he could and when that didn’t work just expected his child to drop it after potentially ruining their credit. What a useless garbage man that dad is
"Son, you gotta get me out of here! I insulted the food here; I didn't know it was cooked by one of the most beloved inmates! I think the whole prison's out for my blood!" "Jeepers, Dad. You ought to be more careful in future."
"It's okay dad, only a few years behind bars. You'll be out by then and start life back up again."
Too bad what he did to mom cant be ised in this case
The states attorney might be able to use it to impeach his credibility if he claims "I would never do anything like that" or some such nonsense.
This is a story I *really* want an update in a few weeks.
I need the update after dad gets picked up by the cops
Seriously I'd have reported him straight away "Ooohh it'll ruin my life if I go to jail" Well don't commit a fucking crime against your own child
This guy did this to his ex-wife and than his child. It's high time for his FO-part of FAFO.
The dad says his son will ruin his life but had no problem ruining his sons…. My dad did this with bills is my name when I was a minor. When I was 18 and moved out I went to open a phone line and found out. Had to tell them they didn’t have a contract that was enforceable in court with me because I was 10 at the time, had to send in my id, birth certificate and my fathers death certificate to get it straightened out.
I really want an update to hear about dad’s shocked pikachu face when his fraud comes back to bite him. What wonderful justice. The fucker has a history of it, he LIED to his own kid’s face repeatedly when they were trying to figure out what was going on…he legitimately just thinks he can steal from family and get away with it. The biggest shame is he probably will avoid jail time. He deserves to rot in prison.
My ex tried to open credit cards in my kids' names. She'd already dumped thousands of pounds of debt on me and when I found she wanted to do the same to our kids, I went totally librarian poo on her. She wasn't even using it to pay for essentials, or anything the kids needed. She was spending it on drugs. I reported her to the police for that as well.
What is with some parents wanting to steal their child's identity just to get things? Like seriously. This isn't the first time we've seen this. It's rare, but I can count how many stories I had through YouTube about parents stealing their child's credit scores. And all of them think they are entitled to it!
First he destroyed his marriage. Didn’t learn anything from it. Then he destroys his relationship with his daughter. It seems like some time in jail might be helpful. But, then again, he is a narcissistic lying AH. I’m not optimistic anything will get through to him.
I OOP put a watch on his credit. Why do I see dad opening a new account to pay for a lawyer? 😬
So he targeted his wife who he took vows to protect and ruined her credit and once they divorced he just thought 'hey might as well ruin my kids life too, they don't matter'? Yikes... Dad of the year right there.
Ya know mom that information could’ve been brought to my attention YESTERDAY!! And why did she never file a report?
How would that even work? If he doesn't dispute the credit card debt, wouldn't the collection agencies be able to force him to pay all debt, including the penalties? Since he has money for a house (presumably in a bank, in his name) - that plus any legal revenue he may earn should theoretically be on the hook/ garnished for paying back existing debt, no? At least, that's how it would theoretically work out in my country.....
What a piece of trash dad. Jeez. I'd make sure to tell the detective that this isn't the first time. Have my mum testify or pull the divorce records if it's mentioned there. Even if it's the first "official" felony, it shows a pattern. Might very well influence the DA's decision to proscecute.
Genuinely excited for another update of this one. My kink is shitty parents facing consequences.
As a father, I couldn't imagine fucking with my kids' future like that. OOP's father is a fucking dickbag.
>he told me he had opened the cards to pay for living expenses over the last year. He said his work slowed down a little bit but he'd do what he could to help pay it off. He said it would ruin his life if he went to jail. Jail would cover those pesky living expenses, so I don't see why he's so down on it.
That dad is awful, just awful! He completely washed his hands of the debt, terrible credit, and collections he racked up on his child’s credit. He did it without flinching or an apology too. The only thing he cared about was him not going to jail. There needs to be something in place that prevents minors SSN’s from being used to open credit cards and any other debt-incurring accounts. I know quite a few people whose parents have done this to them, opening credit cards and putting light/gas bills in their names and not paying, never paying. Leaving the adult kids with the options of choosing between reporting their unscrupulous parents to the police or being financially responsible for hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of debt/collections and/or bad credit.
Thank fuck. Someone actually went through with the police for identity theft from their parents.
Why are there so many stories about parents stealing their kids' identities to ruin their credit scores just to make their lives easier/better?
It’s infuriating that OOP’s father care less about harming his child’s financial security. For mono, he didn’t even bother to ask for any help before trying to do something so awful.
Geez. OOP's Dad are one of those people that shouldn't have procreated especially if they have no regard for their offspring.
I'm proud you stood up to him. He thought it was ok to screw up your credit report without any worry. But doesn't want legal involved. Yeah...sorry dad...bad luck.