Stolen Identity: My Mother-In-Law’s Battle Against Family Fraud

by | Aug 10, 2023 | Family Disputes

From Stolen Cars To Courtrooms: A Mother’s Fight For Justice

This story begins with my mother-in-law’s oldest daughter, mid-’30s, who started hanging out with the wrong crowd.

Without going too deep into the full extent of how the story began or why it happened, her daughter decided to steal her mother’s identity to take out many loans, steal brand new cars from dealerships to give to her friends, take money directly out of her bank account, and much more.

Anything you could possibly imagine doing with a stolen identity, was done to my mother in law by her own daughter.

Mother didn’t know her daughter was using her identity to do this until she started receiving outstanding bills.

Almost every company had procedures in place to quickly deal with identity theft.

The issues were solved with most of the finance companies, however, Mother did have to spend many hours on the phone with close to a dozen places looking to get paid back for a loan she never took out.

Shortly after discovering her identity was stolen, Mother hired LifeLock (affiliate link CJ) and they helped her lock her credit down.

It was about this time when we learned that the DMV in another county issued a driver’s license to the daughter using Mother’s identity.

Mother went to that DMV and the lady at the desk turned the computer around and showed Mother the most recent photo taken for the new driver’s license and it was a picture of her daughter, with her Mother’s identity.

It was clear as day that her daughter stole Mother’s identity.

Mother also was on the phone with the credit report companies to try and have them remove the fraudulent charges from her account, with little luck.

Her credit score is still severely affected and this will be another battle for later that Mother will have to take on if she hopes for fix her high credit score that she worked hard to earn.

After getting her credit locked down and most of the creditors taken care of, Mother got served a court summons from Idaho Finance for small claims court action for several thousands of dollars.

Mother quickly opened a line of direct communication with Idaho Finance and they were headstrong in pursuing legal action, regardless of what she told them.

Within 21 days, Mother had to file an answer to the court summons.

In short, she denied the accusation.

Denying the plaintiff’s claim moved the lawsuit forward in which the two parties would have to present their case before a judge.

This is about when the story starts getting a wee-bit crazy.

At about this time, her daughter gets arrested for the first time when trying to use Mother’s identity – after it’s already been locked down.

Mother was in regular contact with the Idaho state prosecutor and the prosecutor tells Mother to file a police report on her daughter for the Idaho Finance claim.

This is one little area where Mother made a bit of a mistake because it took Mother over a month or so to finally report her daughter’s incident to the police. 

Even though it’s your own child committing crimes against you, it still must have been very hard, mentally and emotionally, to muster up the will power to file a police report against your own kin.

This issue came up later when the judge was trying to understand why Mother missed her court date. Which we explain to the judge in a detailed motion linked to below.

During this time when Mother’s daughter was running around crazy, the daughter’s two kids had nowhere to go (because daughter was in jail) and Mother ended up taking them in while she was in jail.

Since it was daughter’s first offense, they pretty much just let her right out of jail on bond.

During the daughter’s initial criminal court hearing, the judge places a NO CONTACT ORDER and then gives daughter a one-time contact with Mother for daughter to pick up her kids.

Without warning or notice, the daughter doesn’t tell anyone, and she takes her kids back just right after Mother leaves for work and right before the school bus picks up the kids.

Long story short, every family member, school official, neighbor, and bus driver was out on the streets looking for the kids that the daughter took, without telling a single person.

Very shortly we put out an Amber alert.

It wasn’t until the next day or so that we learn that the daughter took her kids back.

With all this chaos going on, Mother misses her court date and gets a Default Judgement entered against her for several thousands of dollars.

Mother quickly files for an appeal and we learn that you can’t appeal a Default Judgement in small claims.

Within about a week or two, her work starts garnishing 25% of her paycheck, by court order.

It was about this time I find in the Idaho small claim rules that we could file a motion for Relief From Default Judgement (redacted).

This motion was granted and we got a new trial with a new court date as if the first trial never happened – a fresh start (kind of).

After this motion was granted, we filed a motion to Set Aside Writ Of Continuing Garnishment and it was granted.

This motion stopped her work from garnishing her paycheck.

Mother’s work garnished two paychecks and we were able to figure out how to get all of Mother’s money returned to her.

The next hearing date was about two months later.

This time, Mother showed up to her trial, more prepared this time.

Upon getting this new trial date, I helped Mother write Discovery Requests that included Admissions, Production, and Interrogatories.

Looking back, the key lesson learned is to keep it simple and straightforward.

We made the mistake of trying to prove it was daughter who stole, not the mother.

We should have essentially said nothing about anything that was going on in our personal life and we should have forced the plaintiff to produce the required evidence.

Since we were the defendant, we technically didn’t have to prove anything.

The plaintiff had the burden of proof to provide evidence that it was Mother.

Previously, Mother attempted to communicate directly with the plaintiff, but the plaintiff would simply not hear it.

Later, we come to find out that this is how the plaintiff operates his loan shark business.

The plaintiff at Idaho Finance has been to court hundreds of times.

It probably isn’t how most finance shops operate, however, it’s clear that this plaintiff was giving loans to people who could not afford it and he would simply just go to small claims quickly and garnish their check and quickly more than doubles his money.

By investigating the plaintiff even further, his website claimed that he was a licensed loan facility, but, I could not verify the license number he provided on his website.

By understanding the character of this loan shark, we knew he was going to hide the ball, with the ball, in this case, being the stolen identification driver’s license the daughter used to fraudulently get the loan from the plaintiff.

As Mother was trying to communicate with the plaintiff before trial, the plaintiff just kept saying that he verified the identity and that it was Mother. 

Which was completely not true.

The plaintiff provided absolutely zero evidence, only words, even in trial.

So, before the next new hearing, we sent the following Discovery Requests.

Admissions

DEFENDANT requests Plaintiff Idaho Finance to admit the truth of the following statements of fact:

  1. You have the original copy of the contract with a wet ink signature of Defendant.
  2. You took a photocopy of Defendant’s identification.
  3. You have a Standard Operating Procedure for verifying loan applicants’ identification.
  4. You have a security camera video and/or audio recording of the transaction with the defendant.

Production

DEFENDANT requests Plaintiff Idaho Finance to produce for inspection and copying the originals of the following documents and things at the offices of Plaintiff or such other place as the parties may hereafter agree.

  1. All original records involved with Defendant’s loan application.
  2. All security camera video and/or audio of the alleged transaction with Defendant.
  3. Photocopy of the identification Plaintiff took of Defendant during the application process.
  4. Plaintiff’s standard operating procedure for verifying the identity of applicants.

Interrogatories

DEFENDANT propounds the following interrogatories to Plaintiff Idaho Finance.

  1. Explain your standard operating procedure for verifying identity.

Then the day of the trial finally gets here.

The judge and the defendant begin with pleasantries as if they were old buddies.

Very odd.

The judge said something to the effect that he wasn’t used to seeing the plaintiff more than once per week. 

They laughed. 

And the trial began.

The small claims trial was very informal, however, we still treated it way more formally than we needed to.

I was sitting right next to Mother and, looking back, I could have easily interrupted when the plaintiff was obviously lying and hiding the ball (the identification with Mother’s daughter’s photo on it – that clearly proves fraud).

One of the craziest parts of the trial was we kept demanding the plaintiff produce the identification that he received to allegedly verify the identity of Mother.

He never produced the identification.

He informed us that the ID was a temporary driver’s license and that it was valid.

He also claimed to not currently have the identification (on the second trial), even though we filed a discovery for production.

As we watched him say he didn’t have the identification, I could quite literally see him pick up what looked to be a copy of a temporary driver’s license. 

He looks at it, looks at Mother, looks back down at the paper, and puts it back down and his body language overwhelmingly looked like he knew he was defeated.

He absolutely refused to show the judge the identification, because he knew he was wrong. 

But, he still kept going.

The bizarre thing is even though the plaintiff never provided any evidence of identification verification, no records, NOTHING. 

Not even the original contract.

Somehow the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff, a second time.

But it still wasn’t over!

Because I’m a student of the How To Win In Court – Without A Lawyer course (affiliate link), I knew we had lots and lots and lots and lots of time and options just because we are American citizens with the right to DUE PROCESS (very important word).

Looking back, what isn’t too fair about all this is that this new trial was much harder and we had to fight uphill.

It seems like if you miss your first court date, you automatically have to work 50 times harder than you would have if you showed up to your first court date.

The lesson, DON’T MISS YOUR COURT DATE.

But, holy cow! 

Mother did nothing wrong, and she gets punished non-stop. 

That’s not fair!

That is unjust.

Anyways.

Since we showed up for trial, this time. 

The plaintiff couldn’t start garnishing her paycheck until after 21 or so days after the judgment was entered because we still have the opportunity to appeal before the judgment is finalized.

Another big lesson learned is that you have SO MUCH TIME to do everything.

Even when it may not feel like it, the due process allows for multiple multiple multiple opportunities to do the right thing, before the truth is FORCED out into the open.

After Mother lost the second trial, we could still appeal to the district court (which we decided we were going to do), where actual rules of evidence would apply.

Evidence rules, which I’m still learning about, are what decides what actual evidence is.

Just because you THINK you have evidence, doesn’t mean that it’s true real evidence that can be admitted for consideration into the court record.

However, in small claims court, the really are no rules for evidence and any BS can be considered.

Whatever, it’s easy small claims court.

But!

We could appeal to district court!

Where evidence rules are strict and 100% enforced.

Before we could appeal, the rules of small claims stated we had to attempt to come to a settlement agreement before filing for the appeal.

I went to work writing up this SETTLEMENT OFFER & APPEAL NOTICE – REDACTED letter and then sent it to the plaintiff.

I offered the plaintiff a settlement of zero dollars and zero cents ($0.00).

Along with the settlement offer, I informed him of the strategy we’d take to force him to produce the identification that he hid from us and the judge.

Essentially, we would get him to produce the identification through a court order. 

If he refused to listen to a court order, we were prepared to put him in jail for disobeying a court order.

Plus part of the additional discovery was going to involve us retrieving licensing records to verify that his loan shark operation was fully compliant at the time he allegedly gave the loan.

I believe the plaintiff was very aware that he could disobey us when we asked (demanded) that he produce the fraudulent identification.

But if you disobey a court order, you’re going to jail!

Also, if you are found to be operating a loan shark company without a license… I’m not quite sure how much trouble you could get in if caught and prosecuted. 

We gave the plaintiff 72 hours to respond to our settlement offer.

By the end of the day, he accepted our settlement offer of zero dollars and zero cents ($0.00).

So, even though we lost both small claims court trials, the plaintiff accepted zero dollars.

He knew he was lying and we were going to expose him in district court by using our discovery tools to expose the truth, the full truth, and nothing but the truth.

It turns out, you can’t use discovery tools in small claims court without the judge’s permission.

Which, even though we did not get the judge’s permission to use discovery tools, we still submitted them to the plaintiff. 

Which he naturally didn’t listen to, because he was not under court order to listen.

Long story short, after he accepts our settlement offer, I stayed on the offense until the plaintiff filed a Satisfaction Of Judgement with the court.

And even after he filed the Satisfaction Of Judgement, I still called the Clerk Of The Court to double check to make sure we didn’t have to do anything else.

Knowing how this scuzz ball plaintiff was playing his game, I was not about to let some other potential little thing slide by that would allow him to keep toying with my mother-in-law.

Clerk verifies we did everything we need to.

And this case was closed.