A Texas teacher and an illegal immigrant living in Kansas have fought for a dozen years to claim the identity of Candida L. Gutierrez in a case that has put a face on the growing crime of “total identity theft” in the US.
On Monday, the real Candida L. Gutierrez saw her identity thief, Benita Cardona-Gonzalez, for the first time. Their encounter came inside a federal courtroom where Cardona-Gonzalez, a Mexican national, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for possessing fraudulent identification documents.
The plea deal Cardona-Gonzalez struck with prosecutors gave her less prison time but guaranteed she would not contest her deportation. She pleaded guilty to an aggravated felony, which typically results in automatic deportation.
When Gutierrez’s identity was stolen, the thief didn’t stop at opening fraudulent credit and bank accounts. Cardona-Gonzalez assumed Gutierrez’s persona completely, using it to get a job, a driver’s license, a mortgage and medical care for her children. She put the stolen name on the birth certificates of her two US-born children in the spots where they list who’s the mother.
“I wanted to make sure I could see her face and she could see my face — so that she knew the face of the person who paid for living her dream,” Gutierrez said. “Because her dream was my nightmare.”
Cardona-Gonzales briefly glanced at Gutierrez while giving a hurried statement in Spanish.
“I accept my punishment and I accept my responsibility and I ask forgiveness of Ms Gutierrez,” she said.
Both women had claimed they were identity theft victims and sought to get new Social Security numbers. The Social Security Administration turned down Gutierrez’s request and instead issued a new number to the woman impersonating her.
Gutierrez was forced to file her federal income tax forms using a special identification number usually reserved for illegal immigrants.
Gutierrez first learned her identity had been hijacked when she was turned down for a mortgage. Each year, she goes to the Social Security Administration with her birth certificate, driver’s license, passport and even school yearbooks to prove her identity and clear her employment record.
She spends hours on the telephone with creditors and credit bureaus, fills out affidavits and has yet to clean up her credit history. Her tax records are a mess. She even phoned the impostor’s employer in a futile effort to find some relief.
When Gutierrez got married a year ago, her new husband set out to clear her credit history. He traced the identity thief to Kansas and contacted federal authorities.
US District Judge Eric Melgren called the case a “classic example” of the harm done by identity theft, saying people who characterize the cases as victimless crimes are uninformed.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
RSS