David Trinko: The human toll of identity theft

When strangers ask if I’m the guy from the newspaper, I’ve always joked that no one else would want to be me.

Being my wife, on the other hand, has been a whole other story lately.

A few weeks ago, I told you about my lovely bride accidentally falling for a scam in the middle of the night, with someone buying some gift cards with our account. It turns out that was small potatoes compared to what’s happened since then.

The part that takes the biggest toll on both of us is we really didn’t do anything wrong, yet we’re living with the paranoia, the stress and the follow-up tasks.

It started innocuously enough, with the two of us hiking near Dayton to celebrate our wedding anniversary. While we were out enjoying nature for a few hours, someone bashed in the passenger’s side window of our car, taking my wife’s purse from under her seat.

We called the authorities, canceled her credit and debit cards and headed back home without our planned dinner. The next day, we scheduled to get the window repaired, and she ordered replacement identification. It was an expensive and time-consuming headache, but it appeared to be over.

Two days later, we realized it was just beginning.

My wife received a call from a bank branch in southern Ohio, confirming she was in their bank branch attempting to cash a large check and take back $2,500 in cash. She wasn’t, as she was busy working in Lima at the time. The teller didn’t allow it, and the woman trying to use her license left the bank. The system worked, we thought.

Then on Friday, our family noticed some odd deposits in accounts. This crook didn’t give up after the first try, depositing more checks supposedly addressed to my wife, depositing a bit of it into an account and taking more than $2,500 in cash. She did that three more times. To no one’s surprise, all of those checks are coming from a closed account, supposedly from a husband and wife in Colorado who we’ve never met who are just as much victims as we are.

We’ve frozen all our accounts with that bank, which makes it really hard to live life. All of a sudden, regularly scheduled withdrawals for bills are seen as not having insufficient funds. There’s money there, but we can’t really use it the way we normally would. The bank staff keeps assuring us we won’t be held liable for the illegal withdrawals, but that’s hard to truly comprehend when the same bank sends you automated messages about overdrawn accounts.

We’re doing what we can, moving our money to another financial institution and trying to change our automated withdrawals to the new account in time. We’ve practically memorized our account and routing numbers.

I feel the worst for my wife, who’s really struggling knowing that someone’s out there with her driver’s license, committing fraud in her name. There’s a helplessness in knowing there’s nothing you can do and a frustration when people assigned to help us sound as baffled as we are. She says she’s cried more in the past two weeks than the past 20 years, which is saying something when you consider we had a child nearly die when she was born.

While there’s some woman going from bank branch to bank branch having a grand time pretending to be my wife, the real deal is a wreck of a woman absolutely convinced she’s done something wrong to deserve this. If she wants to really know what it’s like, she should try living with the stress and aggravation that the thief’s actions caused.

That’s what it’s really like to be her right now, and I’d do anything I could to make our world go back to normal.

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David Trinko is editor of The Lima News. Reach him at 567-242-0467, by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Lima_Trinko.