Kristin Collier thought she was taking a new step into adulthood when she applied for her first credit card at the age of 22. Instead, she walked straight into a financial ambush.
The bank denied her application, and that’s when she found out she was already drowning in debt after someone else had borrowed over $200,000 in her name.
Student loans she never took out. Credit cards she’d never touched. Accounts opened in her name stretching back years. And the person who created the mess wasn’t a scammer in another time zone: it was her mother.
That discovery detonated Collier’s early adulthood, and what followed was a decade of frantic disputes, stonewalling lenders, ruined credit and…