Familial Identity Theft

Identity theft is usually framed as an external threat. Hackers, data breaches, anonymous criminals operating somewhere far away. This episode looks at a much harder reality to face: identity theft that happens inside families, often quietly, over many years, and without immediate detection. The damage isn’t just financial. It reshapes trust, relationships, and a person’s sense of stability long before anyone realizes what’s happening.

My guest is Axton Betz-Hamilton, an associate professor of financial counseling and planning whose research focuses on familial and child identity theft. Her work is deeply personal. As a teenager, Axton discovered her own credit had been destroyed before she ever had a chance to build it, the result of identity theft that began when she was a child. Years later, she uncovered the truth behind who was responsible and how multiple generations were affected.

We talk about how familial identity theft works, why it’s so difficult to detect, and what recovery really looks like when the person who caused the harm was someone you trusted. The conversation covers the long road to rebuilding credit, the emotional fallout that often gets overlooked, and the practical steps people can take to protect themselves and their children before damage is done.

Show Notes:

• [02:15] Axton Betz-Hamilton explains how her parents’ identities were stolen in the early 1990s, before consumers had legal protections.
• [03:50] Discovering a 10-page credit report at age 19 and realizing her financial life was damaged before it began.
• [05:45] What it’s like to learn your credit score is in the second percentile nationwide and why that realization changes everything.
• [07:10] How early frustration with identity theft shaped Axton’s academic path and research focus.
• [09:05] The moment evidence surfaced pointing to a family member as the source of the identity theft.
• [10:45] Uncovering decades of fraudulent accounts affecting multiple generations within one family.
• [12:50] How grief abruptly shifted into investigation after learning the truth about who caused the harm.
• [15:20] The long, two-track process of disputing fraudulent credit while slowly rebuilding legitimate credit history.
• [17:40] Why some fraudulent accounts had to age off credit reports instead of being removed.
• [19:05] How isolation and manipulation can allow familial identity theft to continue undetected for years.
• [21:55] Exploring possible motivations behind the theft and how financial behaviors can repeat across generations.
• [23:10] The simplest way to detect identity theft is by regularly checking all three credit reports.
• [24:30] Why freezing your credit is one of the most effective and underused protection tools.
• [26:05] The importance of freezing children’s credit to prevent damage that may not surface until adulthood.
• [28:00] How modern tools like IRS identity PINs reduce the risk of tax-related identity theft.
• [30:15] Using E-Verify freezes to prevent identity theft tied to employment and income.
• [33:10] The emotional impact of familial identity theft and why boundaries are often necessary for healing.
• [35:00] How family systems fracture when some members believe the victim and others defend the offender.
• [36:40] Why mental health support is a critical part of recovery, not an optional one.
• [38:00] The Identity Theft Resource Center as a comprehensive support option for victims navigating recovery.

Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review. 

Links and Resources:

• Podcast Web Page
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• whatismyipaddress.com
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• Easy Prey on LinkedIn
• Easy Prey on YouTube
• Easy Prey on Pinterest
• Axton Betz-Hamilton – South Dakota State University
• Axton Betz-Hamilton – LinkedIn
• Axton Betz-Hamiliton – Facebook
• Identity Theft Resource Center
• Annual Credit Report
• IRS – Identity Pin
• E-Verify

Transcript:

Axton, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Oh, thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

I'm looking forward to this conversation. Can you give myself and the audience a little background about who you are and what you do?

Sure. I am an associate professor of financial planning at South Dakota State University. In that role, I not only teach financial planning courses, I also conduct research on identity theft. My passion area within the identity theft space is identity theft perpetrated by family members.

Did something happen in your life that made you want to go into this field, or was it you just got interested in it as you're going through your education?

There was a big event that happened that pushed me in this direction career-wise, although I didn't really see that there was a career at the time that it happened. My parents' identities were stolen when I was 11 years old back in the early 90s before individual consumers were considered to be victims of identity theft. Back at that time, of course, it was the financial institutions that were the victims of identity theft, according to federal law.

I watched my parents try and recover from identity theft very unsuccessfully, in part because there were legal protections for individual consumers. And when I was old enough to move away to college, I was excited to go away to college because I could get away from the identity theft stuff and how that was affecting my parents' lives and start my own adult financial journey in college. When I was a sophomore, I moved off campus and got my first little studio apartment, and I called the electric company to establish service.

They told me when service would be turned on in my name and all that good stuff. I thought things were moving along just fine with getting ready to move in until I received a letter in the mail from the electric company that said, “Due to your credit score, we are requiring a $100 deposit to establish service.” And I thought, “Oh, it's because I don't have enough credit.” Because at 19, I knew enough about credit to know that not having credit could be just as much of a problem as having bad credit. I shouldn't have had credit other than a couple of students loans.

That's what I thought the problem was. I wasn't connecting the potential of identity theft in my situation based on what had happened to my parents. I called the number at the bottom of the letter from the electric company to get a free copy of my credit report. It was right there at the bottom of the letter, like, “Hey, if you want to see your credit report, call this number. We'll send you one for free.” I called it just because I wanted to see what a credit report was, not because I thought anything was wrong. And about six weeks later, there was a large manila envelope that came in the mail from the credit reporting agency. It was really thick.

I thought credit reports must be really hard to read. They must come with a lot of instructions and disclosures because there's no way that my credit report is this thick. I got in my little studio apartment, sat down on the arm of the hand-me-down floral print couch that was made in the 1960s, and opened the envelope to see that credit reports are not complicated. They're not difficult to read. They don't come with a lot of instructions and disclosures.

But rather, my credit report was 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. It could be assumed that whoever had stolen their identities had also stolen mine. So that was really the catalyst for, “OK, I want to do something about this. I want to learn who did this to us and hold them accountable.” But I also want other people to understand this experience. I want to help other people feel less alone in their experience.

Because back in the early 2000s, when this was all happening to me, identity theft was not well understood. In fact, it wasn't a crime against the individual consumer at the federal level until 1998. So by 2001, when this is happening to me, nobody really knows what identity theft is. They don't understand it. Law enforcement kind of gets at the average person. Yeah, they don’t know how to protect themselves, they don’t know what to do, they don’t know what to say to you. I was more or less navigating this on my own.

That's an awful introduction to credit.

Yes.

Out of curiosity, did they ever find the individual, individuals, who did this to your family?

Actually, I did. It took a long time. That frustration that I had when I was 19 years old and got that credit report, and saw that my credit score was 380, because they did send a copy of my credit score with the report. I was so naive at 19, I thought, “380, well, that's better than 100, and 100 is perfect on a homework assignment. So, 380 is almost four times as perfect, right?” Then I saw in very small print, “Your credit score’s in the second percentile of all credit scores in the nation,” and realized, “Oh, this is really bad. There are probably people who have filed bankruptcy that have better credit than I do at this point.”

That frustration, I channeled it into my master's degree. My undergraduate degree is in Ag Economics. I did that degree because I grew up on a farm. That was what I knew. You go to school for ag things. Just what everybody around me was doing. But my master's degree is in, or my first master's degree, rather, is in Consumer Sciences and Retailing. And that allowed me the opportunity to start focusing on identity theft in my studies, particularly with class assignments, different research projects, because there was some identity theft research showing up in journals that were finance-related and consumer-oriented.

I went on to Iowa State to get my PhD in Human Development and Family Studies, where I did my dissertation on the experiences of victims who had their identities stolen when they were a child, but didn't learn about it until they were age 18 or older. Looking at the experiences of people who experienced what I did, and approximately six months after I graduated, I found the person responsible. It was kind of by accident. At that time, my mom had just passed away from cancer. Two weeks after she passed away, my dad called me, and he was pretty livid with me for running a credit card over limit in 2001. And I said, “Dad, I didn't. What are you talking about? I didn't run a credit card over limit in 2001.”

There was also a part of me that thought, “OK, this is 2013. Why are you yelling at me about something that happened 12 years ago that I didn't do? What's this time lag here?” And he said, “Don't lie to me. I have the credit card statement in my hand.” And I said, “Dad, what credit card statement is it?” And he said, “Well, first USA.” And I said, “Dad, that was one of the credit cards that was taken out in my name as part of the identity theft. Where did you find it?” And he said, “What's out here in the outbuilding in a file box of your mom's and your birth certificates here in the file folder?”

My blood ran cold because I had my birth certificate. I knew exactly where it was in my apartment in Illinois at that time. The original one that was handwritten and has the seal on it from the '80s. I didn't know what was in this file. But I knew at that time, I'm like, “OK, I want to know about identity theft. I just finished a dissertation on it. I really think mom did this. The dots are starting to connect.” And at first, I said that today. I said, “I think mom was responsible for the identity theft.” And he's like, “No, now there's got to be some other explanation for this.”

And I said, “Anything else you find that is financial paperwork, whether it's got my name on it, mom's name, your name, that was hers, just set it aside. When I come home over spring break—just going to be two weeks later—I’ll take a look at it and try and make sense of it.” Well, by that point, there was a mountain of paper on a workbench out in this outbuilding of documentation of credit card accounts that mom had taken out in my name and dad's name. There were letters where she was denied establishing bank accounts in different states, but she had tried to establish most of them under dad's identity. She had stolen my grandfather's identity as well. And we had never known that his was stolen. He lived with us for a number of years.

There was evidence of tax evasion. There was a lot that needed to be sorted through. And ultimately, the story that mom said back in the early 90s and stuck with throughout most of my life was someone stole her identity and dad's identity. No one stole her identity. She was the person responsible. She stole dad's identity. Then when she used that for really all she could, she moved on to mine. Then I think I got a little harder to control once I was away at college and she couldn't really control my movements or who I was talking to or what I was doing. She backed away from using my identity. She really can't do much with it when you have a credit score of 380. Then she moved on to my grandfather. She didn't steal my grandfather's identity until like, you know, the mid 2000s.

That's got to be particularly devastating, particularly that it was right after she had passed away that you're dealing with the grief and the grief of that and then to find out that she had been stealing everybody's identity.

Yeah. A lot of times people ask me what was that like emotionally? The two weeks after she passed away, up until I got that phone call from dad about the First USA credit card statement, I think dad and I were grieving normally. And then all of a sudden for me, and I think, you know, the same is true for him, that stops because it shifted to I can't be grieving because this is a stranger. Who was this person? And so the mindset shifts to I’ve got to find out who was this person? What did they do? Why did they do it? What was their motivation?

That was a whole process that I went through and detailed in a book that I wrote about my experience. Some of the why my mom did this actually goes back generations with some, you know, maladaptive financial behaviors that go at least two generations back on that side of the family.

She was just kind of continuing the pattern of financial issues.

Yes.

Wow. How long did it take you to like, what was the process of trying to recover both on the financial side and on the emotional side?

Yeah, so I guess no way I'm lucky and that the emotional side of it, like the heavy stuff that happened after mom died, that emotional stuff was more or less separate than from the financial stuff. Because I started disputing fraudulent entries on my credit report with the credit reporting agencies right away. Back in 2001, I went to the state police and filed a police report, which they gladly gave me, they didn't do much more than that.

But back in the early 2000s, like that was a good response, you got a copy of the police report to share with creditors. I contacted original creditors to dispute the accounts. Sometimes the disputes were successful. Other times they were not simply because the name and Social Security number matched, which is really frustrating. Some of the fraudulent information did not, for lack of a better way to say it, fall off my credit report for seven years. Negative account information falls off after seven years.

Some of those accounts just had to age off. But again, going back to when I was 19, and knowing that not having credit can be just as detrimental as having bad credit, I realized that if I can take all this negative information off my credit report, there's not a lot left on there. That's good. There's a couple of student loans that are not in repayment status. I would have a credit score of zero, basically, if I got everything off of there without trying to build good credit. I did get a couple of credit cards. They had very low limits, very high APRs, 30%, which was outrageous back in the mid 2000s. I used them very sparingly, paid them off right away.

But I wanted to get those accounts to start showing that yes, I can manage my credit. I can have a good credit history. My first car loan on a five-year-old used car had 18.23% APR. I paid on loan perfectly for six months. I called up the lender and said, “Hey, can I refinance for a lower interest rate?” They said, “Sure.” I cut the interest rate in half. By that point, my credit score was 520. So it was a lot better than 380. Still wasn't good, but I was able to rebuild or build rather good credit while simultaneously getting those negative entries off of my credit report. It was kind of a two pronged process that took a number of years. My credit report did not clear fraudulent entries until 2009. And this all started in 1993.

Oh my goodness. More time with crazy stuff on your credit than crazy stuff not on your credit.

Correct.

Oh my goodness. That's challenging. And on the emotional relational side, how was that process?

One of the ways in which my mom was successful in stealing our identities and keeping us from knowing about it for 20 years was that she would tell dad and I, “Oh, well, it's got to be someone who knows us really well. It's got to be a friend or a close family member.” She would give us reasons as to why it might be my answer. It might be a friend of hers. And there was enough truth in it that it's like, “Oh, yeah, that could be possible.” Like, how could this friend afford a brand new pickup truck when they don't make that much money? There's just enough nugget of truth there. Like, “Oh, yeah, I could see how it can be possible that they're the person behind the identity theft. Yeah, that makes sense that we don't talk to them anymore.”

She was gradually isolating us from extended family, family friends. It was just the three of us. I'm an only child. It was mom, dad, me, and then my grandfather lived with us for a number of years. But it was kind of us against the world. To create my own reality, knowing that the reality that she had created for me was a lie, I decided to find out for myself what these people are like. You know, mom painted some of our extended family as really terrible, awful, no good people. I had to go find out for myself.

Extended family that I hadn't seen in 20-plus years and maybe had not met them at all, I started showing up on doorsteps, started making phone calls, started asking questions. The same with former friends in the family, showing up on doorsteps, making phone calls, asking hard questions, explaining what had happened, and saying, “Hey, I don't want you to hold back. Don't do the Midwest, nice, polite thing. Just lay it out.” Not a little girl anymore. I would have to tell people that sometimes. Like, “Hey, I'm not a little kid. I'm over 30. Just lay it out for me.” And through that process, I learned a lot about my mom and her behaviors, and even her mother's behaviors and her grandfather's behaviors.

And learned a lot about my dad's side of the family. They are good people. My mom was wrong about that. They're the type of people that, what you see is what you get, which my mom's side of the family was not like that. I don't think she liked that. I think she thought it was beneath her. And so these are terrible people because they're not society people or whatever. Emotionally, like trying to create what is real, like having to investigate that for myself, has either built or rebuilt a lot of those relationships that my mom took away 20-plus years ago.

And so real quick, and then we'll move on. Did you ever find out the motivation of why she was doing this? Was it that she just wanted to live beyond the family's means? Or was there a gambling, was there some addiction? Maybe the identity theft itself was an addiction.

I couldn't find any evidence of addiction. And I looked, I mean, down to going through the receipts in the console of her car, like every piece of paper was evidence to me. I couldn't find any evidence of gambling. I went through her computer, going through her emails looking for anything. There's no evidence of drug use, no evidence of gambling. I think what it was, I do think it was psychological in the sense that she needed to appear wealthy because wealth equals power. And my grandmother was like that, my grandmother, and I never knew her. This is, again, all secondhand information that has been told to me, but there's a lot of consistency in what I've been told, where my grandmother would shop almost compulsively, where she would buy multiples of things.

They keep the multiples of things. And it wasn't quite hoarding. But she would buy multiple multiples of the same board game, and they'd all be in the closet. Why do you need that? Her clothes, she had clothes that when she passed away, the tags were still on them in her closet. She would spend so much that it got to the point where my grandfather apparently considered bankruptcy back in the 70s. I think either mom inherited a little bit of that, or she watched my grandmother's behaviors and thought, “Oh, this is what you do.”

Then her grandfather, so this is where maybe some of the addiction comes in. Her grandfather, she told me, like, died young and that's why my great grandmother got remarried and all this. That's not true. My real grandfather was so alive, he apparently remarried, according to ancestry.com, had other kids. But what's interesting about him is that he owned a gambling park in Ohio, and apparently was quite the character of what I can find online and some of the stories that I've heard. I think there may have been some financial issues there.

There may have been some addiction there, or maybe just some issues with responsibility. There's this pattern in my family system, on that side of doing some strange things with money that are maladaptive, toxic, I think became normalized on that side of the family. Perhaps mom just continued it because she thought it was normal. She's just doing kind of what her mom did, and, you know, getting that money fraudulently, but spending it and buying things. That was one thing, mom, but she bought things for other people.

We never saw what she was buying at home. But she would buy lunches for people or buy a round of drinks, like, life of the party. “I've got money. Look at me. I'm great.” It was that psychological need, I think.

Gotcha. So let's switch over to the practical side of things here. What would be some of the practical steps that people could take to determine whether or not they've been a victim of identity theft and practical steps that people could do to prevent identity theft?

Yeah. One of the easiest ways to detect if you have been a victim of identity theft is get copies of your credit reports. There are three credit reporting agencies in the United States—Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. You can go to annualcreditreport.com and get a free copy of each of those credit reports weekly. That annualcreditreport.com, it used to be if you go there once a year, since COVID, it has changed to you can get your credit reports weekly. It does not affect your credit score. That's a positive. I get that question a lot.

It is important to pull all three because creditors are not required to report to all three bureaus. So you can have something that's fraudulent on your TransUnion report that doesn't show up on your Experian report, for example. You want to pull all three and see if there's any negative account information that is not yours or even positive account information that's not yours that just may have not gone to collection yet. You want to see if there's any addresses that you don't recognize, any phone numbers that you don't recognize, any variations of your name that you don't recognize, and then dispute that information.

If there's erroneous information on your credit report, it doesn't necessarily mean you've been a victim of identity theft because mistakes happen, especially with people who have similar names and similar Social Security numbers. Sometimes records get a little [inaudible]. You just want to dispute that information with the credit reporting agencies and do the best you can to get to the bottom of it. To prevent identity theft, though, freeze your credit. This is easy now. It didn't used to be easy, but anyone can freeze their credit. You do not have to be a victim of identity theft to do this. You just contact each of the three credit reporting agencies, place a freeze, and that means no one can open new credit accounts in using your identity, including you.

If you want a new car and you want a car loan, it's going to get denied until you temporarily lift the freeze. You can temporarily lift the freeze for free as well. That will prevent new account creation from occurring in your name. It doesn't do anything to stop existing account takeover or frauds with any accounts you currently have, but just monitoring those on a regular basis. I look at mine daily just to make sure there's nothing strange going on. Those are two very easy ways to prevent identity theft and also to detect it early as well.

That should be something that parents do for their children as well?

Absolutely. You can freeze your children's credit now for free as well. It's a little bit more of an involved process than freezing your own credit as an adult, because you're going to have to show that you do indeed have a relationship to the child that you want to freeze their credit. You're going to have to mail in some information, copies of birth certificate, proof of your identity, proof of that relationship to that child. Each of the credit reporting agencies has a little bit of a different process with how you go about it. Just search online, credit freeze for children, go to Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion, just follow the steps, and you'll be able to freeze your children's credit.

I think that would be the sort of thing like if someone's, if your kid's credit got compromised when they are, you know, let's say 10 or something like that, you wouldn't find out until they're in college. And all of a sudden, now there's 10 years of mess that you've got to clean up. A nice way, a nice gift to your kid of not having been a victim.

Correct. Absolutely.

And then practical steps on recovering for identity theft, because I had, there's someone that I know that was a victim of identity theft back, I think it was probably the mid, probably in the 90s as well. And theirs was all income, earning identity theft. Their Social had their name and Social had been used on payroll in different states. And of course, those people never bothered to pay their taxes. It went to the courts, the state courts within or the state tax bureaus would then say, “Hey, you need to pay your taxes. You don't show you don't pay them. We're going to take you to court.” Of course, the fictitious person wouldn't show up to court.

There would be a default judgment. At some point, this person found out that there were default judgments for failure to pay taxes in a dozen states. And again, this is the beginning of the realization that identity theft is a real thing. All the states were like, “Oh, very clear that it's identity theft, but we don't have any mechanism to resolve it until you pay the back taxes.” They had to pay the back taxes. Then basically sue the state to get the tax, to get that money back.

Wow.

Because it's already gone to court. There has already been a judgment. So it's like, “Well, there's nothing we can do until you resolve the judgment.” There are certain states where this is like, “I'm just going to pay it.” And that doesn't make sense to fight it. And there are other states where I’ve got to hire a lawyer and try to unravel it. It was a huge mess.

It sounds like it.

And these days, I think it's easier. So let's talk about that process.

Yeah. If you're an identity theft victim in the 90s, it was pretty painful to try and recover. Things have gotten easier with the situation with the person who had their identity stolen for employment and tax purposes. The IRS has created a system now where you can get a PIN number to file your taxes. I do this. And I didn't start doing this until a few years ago, because I got scared when my laptop and other items were stolen in a burglary.

And I'm like, “Oh, they can, like, they have access to my computer, they have access to my personal information, potentially. I’ve got to protect my identity with the IRS. You can go to the IRS website and request an identity theft PIN for free. That PIN is only good for one year. You have to log back into the IRS website every year and get a new PIN, takes about five minutes to do. It's not that hard at all. You will have to enter that PIN if you do your own taxes or provide that into your tax preparer. Your taxes will go through, they will not go through without the PIN. So that keeps anyone from using your identity to file taxes.

Federal taxes.

Federal taxes, yes, not state. I'm glad you pointed that out. I live in a state with state income tax. I'm always thinking federal. That's one nice thing that the IRS does. Some states are better than others that having identity theft protection. You're going to want to check your specific state. When I moved—nothing against Indiana—but when I moved from Indiana to Illinois, Illinois had much better protections than Indiana did. Every state's a little different. You're just going to want to check your state attorney general's website and see what identity theft protections are available to you with regard to your taxes and other resources that they might have.

Now, that individual who had their identity used for tax purposes, that identity was used first to obtain employment. There is a way now that you can minimize the risk of having your identity stolen for employment purposes, which I took advantage of personally in the past couple of years, and that is freezing your identity with E-Verify. E-Verify is a government service where most employers—I would say most major employers, maybe not sole proprietors, but most major employers—will use the E-Verify service to verify an applicant's identity.

If you freeze your identity with E-Verify, nobody can, in theory, apply for employment in your name and pass that E-Verify check as long as your identity is frozen. Now, again, small employers or sole proprietors, they may not use it. It's not a hundred percent foolproof, but most employers in the United States use E-Verify. I have my identity frozen with E-Verify. If I were ever to leave South Dakota State, I would need to unfreeze it temporarily and then put that freeze back on just like you would with your credit reports when you freeze and unfreeze those.

That is new. I did not know that you could freeze with E-Verify. That's good to know. And I think I have a project for later today.

It's really easy. It's very similar to how you freeze your credit reports.

For kind of the steps of recovery, clearly, we talked about disputing anything else on your credit and trying to get anything that looks erroneous off there. All this has been financial. Like in your case, with familial identity theft, there's a pretty big emotional component with that. And then probably even so with just general identity theft. What's the process of trying to reestablish the—I don't want to be afraid of my family members. I don't want to be afraid of society at large when it comes to identity theft?

Yeah. That's a good question. With the research I've conducted on familial identity theft, and most of the research I do involves interviewing victims, and I asked them, “How did this impact your relationships with your family?” And most of the time, participants tell me, “Healing was mostly facilitated by limiting contact with the individual who stole my identity.” You know, having that boundary there, focusing on yourself, focusing on moving forward with rebuilding, you know, your credit, your financial security. That is really key.

As part of this process, oftentimes what happens is that once the identity theft is known within the family system, some family members are going to believe the offender, some are going to believe the victim. You have these factions that form in families—you’re going to find a victim who's supportive of you and who's not. Some victims do have supportive family members they can lean on, others don't. The number one resource that familial victims go to based on my research is a mental health provider to work through the emotional issues to work through the relationship issues just to process the enormity of what this experience means for them and what it means for their place and role within the family system.

Yeah. Are there any organizations that help kind of facilitate both aspects of this?

Yes. The Identity Theft Resource Center. So they are a nonprofit based in San Diego. They have been in existence for over 25 years. And they, [inaudible:00:35:06] a better way to say it, get it when it comes to how comprehensive identity theft is and how it can impact your life, and not just the financial. They understand the emotional consequences, they understand physical consequences that can occur, they understand the legal consequences, they understand the relationship consequences.

They have a wealth of information on their website. You can call them, you can chat with them on their website. And again, they're just a wonderful resource where it's kind of a one-stop shop. And one thing that victims often struggle with is that you're told to go to law enforcement to file a police report, then you do that. And then you contact the credit reporting agencies and they help you a little bit with the credit report. And then you go to financial institutions. You’re here, there, and everywhere, and you're retelling your story over and over and over again.

You get help with one little sliver of how identity theft is affecting you. Most of these entities—and nothing against them—they’re trained in that little slip. As a victim, what can happen is you just get overwhelmed and tired of retelling your story over and over again and trying to integrate all this information that you're being told by these different entities. The nice thing about the Identity Theft Resource Center is that they understand all of it. They're kind of a one-stop shop. You can go there and get help, get resources.

And if there's something that they can't help you with, they're going to point you in the right direction. But again, they understand the financial consequences, the emotional ones, the physical ones, the legal ones, and the relationship ones.

Awesome. As we wrap up here, are you still looking to interview victims of identity theft? And if so, how can they get a hold of you?

Absolutely. So the best way to get a hold of me is by email. It’s [email protected]. I also have a LinkedIn profile; you can search for me on LinkedIn. I have a professional Facebook page as well, Dr. Axton Betz-Hamilton, all one word. Feel free to reach out to me. We can connect and see if you may be a good fit or one of my research studies.

Awesome. And we'll link to all of those in the show notes that can be found on our website. Axton, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Well, thank you for having me.