I recently was declined for a credit card that I applied for, and I was devastated.  I couldn’t believe that I was declined, so I contacted the agency that declined me and they informed me that I was eligible for a free credit report.  Well, a few days later I received my credit report and on it I found a whole bunch of late payments and a charge off for a phone bill and I was left wondering what was going on.  I had worked so hard to keep my credit in good shape and made all my payments on time, and here was my credit report looking like a train wreck and I was left looking at companies that I had never had accounts with and was wondering why.

Well, I got on the phone to talk this thing through with my sister, who has always been my confidant and my best friend.  When I told her about this situation, I was astounded at her response.  She said that a few years ago she had the same problem with her credit report and couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong, and then she discovered that her identity was stolen, and not by some stranger, but by our mother.  You see, our mother has always been very unstable, and apparently since she had all our social security numbers and such, she was pretty easily able to apply for credit in our names with little or no background check, and once approved, she couldn’t pay her bills and left my sister’s credit in a shambles.  Anyway, Terri said that she didn’t want to press charges against her, so she made Mom pay off all the bills and explain everything to the creditors and promise to never do it again.  Terri said that she now has fraud protection on all her credit cards so that if anyone tries to get a credit card or any type of credit in her name, they contact her immediately and ask her if she really applied for this.  She said to date mom has kept her word and backed off her credit.  I guess she didn’t need it anymore since she just moved onto the next child, me! Well, I told Terri that obviously she hadn’t learned her lesson yet and I would go through credit repair, but I was going to press charges against her.  She obviously hasn’t learned from her mistakes and someone needs to hold her accountable for her actions.