Lila Vigil’s 10-Year Struggle with Identity Theft

December 2007
    Lila Vigil thought it was about time to get her finances on track. She had some debt, including a car payment and about $5,000 on a few different credit cards. In late
20thcentury America, it didn’t sound like much at all.
   
    But to Vigil, it was too much. She had her first corporate job, at the large accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, and she was raising her seven-year-old son, Aaron, by herself. Finally, she was earning enough to pay her monthly expenses. Still, Vigil’s debt bothered her.
   
    “I really don’t like owing anybody anything,” she says.
   
    So in 1996, Vigil moved out of her expensive apartment and leased a five-bedroom house in a nice part of Sarasota, FL, with good public schools. She and her son each had a room, leaving three other spaces for her to rent out. “I did this housing plan to work off my own debt quicker,” she says. “I thought it was financially a great idea to live with all these people to save money on rent.”
   
    But finding trustworthy roommates proved difficult. Tenants moved in and out. Vigil’s boyfriend often stayed over. The roommates and the boyfriend often brought friends to the house to hang out. Vigil didn’t like that her son was living in a home with so much instability. And she really didn’t like her boyfriend’s taste in friends.
   
    “They weren’t bikers, they weren’t goth, but they all had a hard edge to them,” says Vigil.
   
    One of these hard-edged guys was named Tom Bailey. (Or at least Vigil thinks that was his name.) Her boyfriend had bailed him out of jail. He wasn’t all that memorable, Vigil says, just another tough guy with a couple tattoos who liked to sit on her couch.

    But one day Vigil walked into the house just in time to see Bailey coming around the corner from her home office, which was just off the living room. 
   
    “It was awkward and pretty weird,” says Vigil.

    On the office floor was all of Vigil’s mail, including pre-approval offers from banks and credit card companies trying to lure her into opening a new account. It was junk mail, she thought, and she didn’t pay it much attention.

    “I never even opened that stuff,” Vigil says. “I’d just let it lie around, and every so often I’d bundle it up and throw it out.”

    Also in that pile of mail were her bank statements, which included blank checks that could be written to cash. Inside her desk was a piece of scrap paper on which Vigil had written the Social Security numbers of herself, her ex-husband and her son, as well as the passwords to her business and personal e-mail accounts.
   
    “That’s how stupid I was,” says Vigil. “I was really disorganized, and I just wasn’t keeping track of my finances.”
   
    Vigil was working too hard to give much thought to the creepy man exiting her office. She soon forgot about the incident.

Time for a change

    As her year-long lease came to an end, Vigil decided the savings weren’t worth the risk of raising Aaron in such a chaotic environment. She found an apartment nearby. The manager was nice, but before Vigil signed the lease, he took her aside. “He said,  ‘Everything looks good, but I want you to know that your credit rating is really, really awful,’” she remembers.
   
    Vigil requested a copy of her credit report. What she found astounded her: a long list of credit cards in her name that she had never applied for, many of them maxed out. The accounts were all in her name, but the bills were being sent to addresses in central Florida where she had never lived.

    Whoever had stolen her identity hadn’t bothered to make large purchases with the cards. Rather, the person used the blank checks that came with the monthly statements to make cash withdrawals, usually for even numbers in a range between $1,500 and $3,000.    

    Vigil had never written such a check in her life.
   
    “I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “I was so completely surprised and overwhelmed.”
   
    The year was 1997, and the words “identity theft” had not yet entered the cultural lexicon. Vigil didn’t know what to call the crime; she simply knew that she’d been scammed.
   
    “I didn’t even know it was possible that someone else could do that,” she says. “That’s why I was so embarrassed by it. Because I felt really dumb.”

    A few creditors started to call. Then more. Finally Vigil had to bar her then-eight-year-old son from answering the phone altogether because a few debt collectors tried badgering him. The people on the phone would pester her, asking her why she had written so many checks to cash if she didn’t have the income to re-pay them.
   
    “I told them I never did that, but they wouldn’t listen, and they didn’t believe me,” Vigil says. “I would just start screaming at them to leave me alone. I was enraged.”

    Some friends put her in touch with a bankruptcy lawyer. She could file an identity theft report with the state attorney general, the lawyer told her, but that  process might last up to four years during which time creditors would continue to hound her. The lawyer said that the only way to recover the money was to find and sue the thief. But at the time Vigil had no idea who might have done this to her.

A bad situation gets worse

    Absent a suspect, the lawyer told Vigil that her only recourse was to file for bankruptcy on all the debts that were not hers. After getting hounded by creditors for months, Vigil glumly accepted. She maintained her car payments and $4,000 in remaining credit card debt, which she committed to paying off. But she filed bankruptcy on the rest. Eventually she defaulted on a whopping $80,000 in someone else’s debt.
   
    “I never even found out what most of the money was spent on,” she says.
   
    Vigil sent the required check and legal papers to her lawyer, who said she would file them in court. Vigil waited. The collectors kept calling. They had no record of any bankruptcy, they told her. Vigil repeatedly called the lawyer’s office, and left messages with the office assistant. But the lawyer never called her back.
   
    “I felt she was avoiding me, that I had been gypped,” Vigil says.

    Eight months later, in 1998 Vigil received a phone call from the lawyer. The office assistant had been caught stealing the bankruptcy filing fees, the lawyer said. She had thrown all the paperwork in the trash, and for months had blocked phone calls from angry clients.
   
    “I came very close to telling her…off,” says Vigil. “I was feeling less and less trusting.”
   
    But the lawyer promised to handle Vigil’s case personally. She gave Vigil her cell phone number. She looked up all the addresses linked to the bogus credit accounts. The only thing they had in common is they all had been apartments rented at some point by a man named Tom.
   
    “Initially I said I didn’t know any Toms,” says Vigil. “It took me a while before I figured it out that it might have been my old boyfriend’s friend.”
   
    But Vigil had no proof that it was the same Tom, and she had no time or resources to track him down, so she resigned herself to bankruptcy. Finally, in January 1999, she appeared for her day in court. From the bench, the judge said that identity theft cases were becoming more and more common in the county, “and it’s sad that the only out for people like this is to request bankruptcy,” Vigil recalls him saying.

The aftermath

    For Vigil, the financial consequences of identity theft lingered for years. The original theft happened in 1997. It took almost three years simply to get her bankruptcy approved. Only then did the collectors finally stop calling.

    She bought a house of her own in 2001, at a time when interest rates were at historic lows. But because her credit had been trashed by bankruptcy, Vigil was forced to accept a high interest rate on her mortgage, costing her thousands of dollars extra every year.
   
    She repaid all of her own credit card and car debt on time. Now, a full decade after her identity was stolen, Vigil’s life is finally returning to normal. “Only in the last few months did the bankruptcy come off my credit report,” says Vigil.
   
    But the emotional damage lingers. Recalling the event still makes her visibly wince. “It’s embarrassing more than anything else,” she says. “My grandfather was so smart about his money. If he were still alive, he would be flabbergasted. How could I be so careless? So gullible? Who did I let into my home?”
   
    Vigil eventually married a man named Bruce, who runs his own home refurbishing business. To this day, the sting of identity theft hurts so much that Vigil can’t stand to participate in the family’s monthly finances. “I have Bruce do them,” she says. “I get so mad that, even ten years later, I still can’t do it myself.”

Low-tech, low-profile

    Vigil’s case reminds us that many of the stereotypes about identity theft aren’t always true. First, because high-tech computer and internet-related identity theft cases grab more headlines, it’s easy to forget that people have been stealing identities ever since banks invented the blank check. Sometimes the most pernicious forms of identity theft are also the lowest-tech. A loose credit card statement or scribbled Social Security number can cause as much damage as a password lifted by spyware.
   
    Second, though the Federal Trade Commission reports that the average identity thief steals $4,800, individual losses can be many times greater than that. If a thief uses the victim’s personal information to open new credit accounts, and especially if he has the statements sent to a new address or post office box, he can steal tens of thousands of dollars knowing that he probably has at least a few months’ head start before the victim even finds out.
   
    Third, there often is no quick fix to identity theft. While many cases can be resolved with a call to a resolution service and communication with the three major credit bureaus, some cases are so complicated that they require months and sometimes years to resolve. Even after the financial issues are resolved, the emotional scars of identity theft can leave a victim wracked by anger and fear for years to come.
   
    Unbeknownst to her, Vigil made herself an ideal target for identity theft. She lived in an unstable household with many guests unknown to her, and with her private financial documents lying around. Vigil is still mad at herself for doing this, but really, how many of us are doing something similar right now? Even if we don’t have tattooed strangers walking around our house, we may be making targets of ourselves in other ways. How many of us recycle our financial documents without shredding them? Log onto the Internet using an unprotected wireless server? Give our names, addresses and phone numbers to every corporate sweepstake or contest? As our modern economy turns personal information into a commodity to be bought and sold, it stands to reason that some people will try to steal that commodity. We can take a number of steps to minimize the risk, but it may never be possible to completely protect ourselves. Lila Vigil’s tribulations are a stark reminder of that.
   
    “It just never occurred to me that all this could happen,” Vigil says.