10 Cases of Identity Theft That Will Make
Your Skin Crawl
10.
Dead Mother
It’s a tragic fact of life that you’ll
probably live through your parents’ deaths.
But if there’s one way to shred any sympathy
people have, it’s using your deceased mother’s
identity to defraud the government.
For Thomas Prusik-Parkin, that was apparently
the next logical step.
In a plot somewhere between Psycho and America’s
Dumbest Criminals, Prusik-Parkin actually
dressed up as his 73-year-old mother Irene
- wig and everything - to continue claiming
social security.
And that’s not to mention the $2.2 million
New York townhouse that she left behind.
Prusik-Parkin carried on the charade from
2003 to 2009, but he was eventually rumbled
when his mom’s house went into foreclosure
and he claimed the new buyers would be living
in his home illegally.
To get it back, he arranged a meeting with
the already suspicious District Attorney at
the house, where they found him wearing a
red cardigan, lipstick, manicured nails and
breathing through an oxygen tank.
It’s not hard to see how he got 12 years
in prison after that move.
9.
College Scammer
Esther Reed is quite the character.
Like most serial scammers she had a major
rap sheet, but she was known for stealing
identities so she could go to university.
At least you can admire her desire for education,
unless she just really liked the college lifestyle.
Regardless, in 2004 Reed found the identity
of Brooke Henson online, a 20-year-old South
Carolina woman who went missing in 1999.
Despite the fact that Henson was a High School
dropout, Reed used the name to get admitted
to both Harvard and Columbia Universities.
But when Reed applied for a part-time job
under Henson’s name, the interviewer looked
her up and found her namesake was missing.
So he did what anyone would do and called
the police.
They concluded that Reed was in fact Henson
but she just didn’t want to see her family.
But one savvy detective demanded a blood test
- at which point Reed agreed and promptly
bolted.
It wasn’t until January 2008, after she
made the Secret Service most wanted list,
that she willingly confessed all the way over
in Chicago.
8.
Fake Doctor
So it’s one thing to steal an identity,
but it’s a whole other level to impersonate
the same person and get caught not once, not
twice, but three separate times.
It all started in 1976 for Gerald Barnbaum,
when he decided to take the easy route to
a cushy doctor job after losing his pharmacist
license.
Instead of medical school, he found an actual
doctor by the name of Gerald Barnes, legally
changed his name and just straight up asked
the California Medical Board to send him copies
of ‘his’ qualifications.
With that, he found a job and played doctor,
which went fine until 1980 when he missed
a patient’s untreated diabetes and took
the blame for his death two days later.
After he served his time, he tried the doctor
thing again in 1984 under the same name, but
he was caught and sentenced to 3 years behind
bars.
It wasn’t until he found another job at
a Los Angeles health clinic in 1995 that he
was finally imprisoned for life just one year
later.
You have to wonder why he kept at it, but
you can’t teach an old doc new tricks I
guess.
7.
Reliving High School
Crime isn’t always malicious.
Sometimes it’s just about exorcising your
personal demons, like in the case of Wendy
Brown.
Honestly this one is as depressing as it is
creepy.
The Wisconsin mother didn’t exactly have
the best childhood.
She had an abusive relationship with her mother,
which led to a speech impediment and bullying
at school.
And to make matters worse, she got pregnant
and dropped out of high school at age 17,
all the while seeing her sister flourish as
a cheerleader.
So you can see why might have pined for some
good ol’ days of her own.
But in 2008, the 33-year-old took matters
a little bit too far when she used the birth
certificate of her 15-year-old out-of-state
daughter to enroll at her local high school.
Brown took classes with teens less than half
her age, tried out as a cheerleader and even
attended a pool party with her classmates
without getting rumbled.
But the jig was up after 2 weeks when teachers
reported her truant and found her in police
custody over a separate forgery charge.
Brown was sentenced to 3 years in a psychiatric
institution, but on the bright side for her,
she did use that time to finally get her high
school diploma.
6.
Prostitution
It has to be a pain to get a phone call at
home asking to make bail for someone.
But it’s just baffling when that call is
to bail out, uh, yourself.
In 2007, 20-year-old Floridian Brittany Ossenfort
got a call from Orange County Sheriff's Office
asking for the cash to get none other than
Brittany Ossenfort out of the slammer.
But in reality, this ‘Brittany’ was actually
Michele, Ossenfort’s transgendered former
roommate - known by the state as Richard Lester
Phillips.
Michele contacted Brittany from jail after
she was caught offering oral sex to an undercover
police officer for $30.
And to make matters worse she used her old
friend’s name on the police report.
As if that wasn’t embarrassing enough for
the young woman, she had to deal with some
very annoying long-term consequences too.
For one, her name and information was on the
police website for a whole week, but even
worse, the police couldn’t alter the details
of the report on their system, meaning in
the eyes of the law she was arrested for soliciting
sexual acts.
Now Ossenfort has to carry documents with
her at all times to prove she isn’t a prostitute,
just in case she’s ever actually arrested.
5.
Revenge Exhibition
Like so many people, Albuquerque photographer
Jessamyn Lovell had her identity stolen in
2010, when her wallet was taken outside a
San Francisco art gallery.
Lovell had to deal with a spate of bills and
citations, as well as a possible laundry list
of crimes like petty theft, parking tickets
and property damage.
Once she had cleared herself through the normal
channels, she hired a private investigator
to find the culprit, a woman named Erin Hart,
and tail her over the course of 2 years.
But instead of just leaving it to the law,
Lovell decided to handle things in her own
way by hosting an exhibition at the same gallery
where her wallet was stolen and actually inviting
Hart.
The exhibition displayed shots of the thief
going about her business along with the details
of how Lovell had cleared herself of the crimes
committed in her name.
But as far as the photographer knows, the
subject never appeared to face her victim.
Could you really blame her?
4.
Meth Baby
You’d be surprised how many kinds of information
people will steal.
It’s not just finances and travel documents,
medical identity theft is a very real problem
for some people - including Anndorie Sachs.
The mother of 2 from Salt Lake City got a
call from Utah Child Protective Services in
2006 saying that her newborn baby was positive
for Methamphetamines.
That meant all of her kids would be taken
away.
But there’s just one problem - Sachs hadn’t
been pregnant in over 2 years.
The authorities took some convincing, despite
there being no baby in sight.
They even interviewed Sachs’ boss over her
child’s meth exposure, which isn’t great
for the resume.
It turns out that a woman named Dorothy Moran
had stolen Sachs’ Driver’s License and
gave birth under her name, not to mention
her insurance.
But the worst long term effect could be to
the victim’s medical records, since Moran’s
incorrect blood type was listed for Sachs
and spread across the entire US medical system.
That nearly risked the 27-year-old’s life
when she was sent to hospital with a blood
clotting condition.
In a morbid twist, had the baby not tested
positive for drugs, Sachs would never have
known to check the records and may have risked
death from a mismatching transfusion.
3.
Political Assassination
Normally when people wake up to find their
identities stolen, they’re on the hook for
something along the lines of credit card fraud,
maybe some hacking.
But as damaging as that can be, it doesn’t
have quite the same potential for trouble
as being implicated in an international political
assassination.
That was the case after Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh,
a senior official in Palestinian Islamic Fundamentalist
group Hamas, was found dead in his Dubai Hotel
room with a bottle of Medicine by his side.
While originally thought to be natural, accusations
quickly turned to the Israeli national intelligence
agency Mossad.
The killers used the passport details of 26
Israeli dual-citizens from mostly European
countries, like British born Paul John Keeley,
to cover their tracks in killing Al-Mabhouh.
Israel initially denied any involvement, but
Mossad’s chief Tamir Pardo later promised
to never again use British passports in operations.
Luckily for those initial suspects, their
Governments had their backs.
But there was a real possibility that they
would have to prove their innocence in an
international scandal.
2.
The Chameleon
There aren’t many more traumatic experiences
than your son going missing.
So imagine the feeling of having him returned
- only to find out that he’s an imposter
7 years the real son’s senior.
That was the earthshaking realization for
Beverly Dollarhide in 1998, after her family
was targeted by the Chameleon, AKA Frederic
Bourdin.
The French trickster has a prolific history
of over 500 impersonations, but in his most
famous scam he took on the identity of missing
14-year-old Nicholas Barclay in late 1997.
23-year-old Bourdin called a missing children’s
center in Virginia and asked for records of
any teenagers matching his own features.
He then claimed to have found that child in
Spain.
But since Bourdin had the wrong colored eyes
and accent, he convinced his new-old family
that he had been in a French child-prostitution
ring that chemically altered his eyes.
Things went well enough for Bourdin at first,
but they quickly unraveled as he struggled
to cope with the situation and was submitted
for psychiatric evaluation after mutilating
his own face.
But the facade finally cracked when a private
investigator Charlie Parker confronted Bourdin
leading to Bourdin’s arrest and a 6-year
prison sentence.
But that isn’t even close to the end of
the Chameleon’s tale.
All I can say is look him up.
1.
False Child Pornography Arrest
In 2004 Simon Bunce from Hampshire, England
was falsely tarred with society’s worst
possible brush after being arrested on charges
of possessing child pornography - despite
owning nothing of the sort.
In a life-altering and unfortunate tale, he
became one of the nearly 4,000 arrests in
Operation Ore - the UK’s largest ever crackdown
on the crime.
It followed an American exercise that took
down the porn payment-processing company Landslide
Productions, which just happened to have Bunce’s
credit card on file.
When that came to light, Bunce lost his $250,000
a year job and pretty much everyone in his
life cut off ties with him.
That was except for his wife, who believed
his innocence.
After doing some sleuthing of his own through
the American Freedom of information act, he
found that his credit card had been used to
make the purchase around the world in Indonesia
at the very same time that he was using it
at a London restaurant.
That, combined with the fact that his computer
came back completely clean, was more than
enough to exonerate him and reunite the family,
but it just shows what can happen if you’re
not careful with your card.
That was 10 cases of identity theft that will
make your skin crawl.
Which one scared you the most?
Let us know in the comments and make sure
to like and subscribe.
While you’re at it, check out this great
Alltime10s video on screen now.
