This Identity Theft Story Shows How Far Fraud Can Go

One small mistake can become a huge problem. In this case, one woman’s moment of forgetfulness turned into an ordeal that invaded every aspect of her life. This identity theft story illustrates how the crime can affect so much more than a bank account or credit score, highlights some of the hidden consequences of someone else using your identity, and demonstrates the resilience victims need to fight back and recover.

See Stolen Identity, Stolen Peace with Brooklyn Lyon for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode.

Brooklyn Lyon is an ordinary twenty-something from Texas. She knew a little bit about identity theft before her ordeal, but she definitely wasn’t an expert. And she never thought it would happen to her. Now, she has firsthand experience with what can happen when someone steals your identity, and she’s excited to start sharing her story.

The Start of Brooklyn’s Identity Theft Story

In October 2024, Brooklyn and her husband moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth area. They were recently married and excited to be out of their college town and in a new area. There had been a lot of car break-ins in that area recently, and they knew it was a possibility for them, too. Brooklyn’s mom works for a judge, and one of the pieces of advice she gave was to never leave anything in the car, ever. Brooklyn tried to follow that rule.

But one night, she went grocery shopping after work. She bought a lot of stuff, and her husband helped her bring it into the apartment. In the confusion of the two of them carrying things back and forth, Brooklyn thought one of them had grabbed her work bag. But it was still in the car. That night, someone smashed the window and stole it. It had her work laptop, wallet, cards, and everything.

When she left the next morning and saw the smashed window, the feeling was surreal. But she already knew what steps to take from hearing other people’s experiences. Even though she was shaky and panicky, she called the police, then locked her credit and started calling financial institutions to get her cards shut down. Within fifteen minutes, everything was locked down. The thieves had already maxed out the cards, but they couldn’t do anything else.

Brooklyn filed a police report, but nothing came of it. They got footage from a CVS down the road of a couple going into the store, but they weren’t even sure if the couple was related. They never said anything after that, which was normal. And Brooklyn was okay with that. Car break-ins happened a lot, and she would rather the police focus on more serious crimes.

From Car Break-In to Identity Theft

For a while after the break-in, everything was quiet. Brooklyn had no idea this was the start of an identity theft story. The thieves kept trying to use the cards, but since everything was locked, nothing came of it. Brooklyn reported it when it happened and kept records of every instance, but she wasn’t expecting much.

Then in mid-February 2025, she got a letter in the mail saying she owed money because she rented a U-Haul and never returned it. She didn’t recall ever renting a U-Haul. But her husband had worked for U-Haul in college, and he recalled that you had to submit a driver’s license to rent one. Maybe someone had used her stolen driver’s license.

After the initial break-in, Brooklyn had signed up for Experian’s identity theft monitoring service to send her an alert if her info was shared online. The same day she got the letter from U-Haul, she got a notice that her driver’s license was on the dark web. It was a shock, but she knew the thieves were trying to make money. She had assumed that they would throw away everything when the cards stopped working, but it made sense that they would sell her license if they could get money for it.

She managed to get the U-Haul issue taken care of without having to pay. And for a while, everything was quiet again. She and her husband went on a belated honeymoon. But knowing that information was out there was stressful. Brooklyn felt like she was peering around every corner, just waiting for whatever disaster would happen next.

The Plot Thickens

Another thing Brooklyn signed up for after the break-in was USPS Informed Delivery. It takes a picture of everything you’re getting in the mail for the day and emails it to you so you know what to expect in the mail. She recommends signing up for it. It’s what clued her into how deep this identity theft story went.

In early July, Brooklyn hadn’t checked her Informed Delivery messages in a while, but she was looking for an invitation to a friend’s wedding. When she scrolled through the notifications, she saw a Certified Mail letter. It was from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and had her full address but the wrong apartment number and a stranger’s name under the address. She freaked out – since the apartment number was wrong, she wouldn’t be able to sign for it, and it looked important. She thought she might be in some kind of trouble.

So she called the police non-emergency line for help, and the officer explained that the name underneath was an inmate. When she said she didn’t know the inmate, the officer gave her the phone number for the jail mailroom. The mailroom told Brooklyn the inmate had put her down as his contact when he was booked into jail. Brooklyn still had no idea who he was.

Her first thought was that maybe this inmate put down a random stranger’s info because he didn’t have anyone. So she looked up his criminal history. He’d been arrested for identity theft and car burglary, among other things. Her mother also used her legal connections to pull his booking sheets, and sure enough, he’d written down Brooklyn’s name and address, but a phone number that wasn’t hers.

At that moment, Brooklyn realized this identity theft story was bigger than she’d thought.

Finding Identity Theft

The jail mailroom directed Brooklyn to another police officer who gave her more details. The inmate’s girlfriend had apparently created an account in the jail communication system using Brooklyn’s info. The jail communication system lets people sign up, verify their identity with a photo of themselves and their driver’s license, and then easily talk to people who are incarcerated. It’s a great system. But this woman had used Brooklyn’s stolen driver’s license to sign up under her name. The officer even found that the woman had photoshopped some of her facial features to look more like Brooklyn’s.

Brooklyn started tracing the man’s jail journey in an attempt to unravel her own identity theft story. He was in a different county previously, and when she called, it turned out the woman had done the same thing there. A police detective from that county reached out and told her that this same woman had stolen the identities of 17 other people, and so far Brooklyn was the only victim that had caught on. He asked her to come down and talk in person.

In that conversation, the detective asked Brooklyn for all phone numbers and addresses she’s ever had. That helped identify some phone numbers the thief was using that weren’t Brooklyn’s. He also said that it looked like her driver’s license had been sold, and the woman using it wasn’t the person who stole it from Brooklyn’s car. But that’s all the information she got.

An Identity Theft Story Becomes an Obsession

Brooklyn became obsessed with unraveling this identity theft story. She followed the inmate’s jail journey – in just a few months, he spent time at four different facilities, and she checked with all four to see if this woman was using her identity. She followed along on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s website and made a ton of phone calls. During the first week after discovering the identity theft, she made probably fifty phone calls. It became almost a second full-time job. She ended up in a giant email thread with four investigators from four different counties, going back and forth about the situation and things Brooklyn noticed.

That weekend, something told Brooklyn to pull her credit report again. She had pulled it every month since the initial break-in, but something told her to do it now. She did. And she found phone numbers and an address on it that weren’t hers. She used a phone number lookup tool on the numbers, and one of them came up as her.

You can find out a lot from people’s phone number and their email.

Brooklyn Lyon

At that point, Brooklyn had several phone numbers and an email address that had been set up in her name. So she started searching. The thief had opened a PayPal account in Brooklyn’s name and created a Facebook page. The page had no photos of Brooklyn, thankfully, but it was tied to her number. Brooklyn tried to log into the PayPal with a password recovery process, and it showed a different email address. All but the first three letters were blacked out, but they were the first three letters of a popular woman’s name. So now Brooklyn had a likely first name.

Tracking Down the Thief

While Brooklyn was following the woman who stole her identity across the internet, she was also creating portals in every police department involved to get as many files as she could about the inmate and anything associated with him. From the original county that sent her the letter that started everything, she requested everything with her name on it. It was her name and her driver’s license – legally, it was hers. So they gave it to her.

One of the documents she got was a series of texts between the thief and the inmate. She found the thief’s birthday and her full first name. The website mugshots.com lets you look up anyone’s mugshots with their first name and state. Brooklyn used the birthday to verify, and she found her.

Now that Brooklyn had her name, she went back to social media. She found the woman’s real Facebook page and started learning about her. She was a mom and had been married a couple of times. Now Brooklyn had a face to put to the person behind this identity theft story.

Brooklyn thinks this woman’s main motivation for stealing her identity was just hiding from the law. Once she had a name, she searched everywhere. The woman had an extensive criminal history. She had been arrested multiple times since age twenty, and she had just kept running. She wasn’t originally from Texas and had warrants out for her arrest. So she was an out-of-state fugitive running from the law. Of course she didn’t want to give her real information to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice!

Unraveling the Fraudulent Accounts

Brooklyn reached out to phone companies to see if any of the numbers associated with the thief were in her name. Since she wasn’t the customer, they wouldn’t give her much, but they did say they didn’t find anything associated with the accounts that were linked to her. But that didn’t stop other things from getting tangled together. The jail communication system also allows people to put money in inmates’ commissary accounts, and the card the woman used had Brooklyn’s name on it. It never showed up on Brooklyn’s credit, so it could have been a prepaid card or the thief added Brooklyn as an authorized user on another card.

As recently as November, Brooklyn found the thief’s phone number and real email associated with her electric provider account. She’s sure the woman signed up under Brooklyn’s name because she doesn’t want to be found. Every place she’d used Brooklyn’s identity was in an attempt to hide. Despite the warrants out for her arrest and Brooklyn finding a couple different addresses as she attempted to unravel the identity theft story, the woman remained impossible to locate.

So Brooklyn filed a lawsuit. No one could find her to serve it, so the alternative was a settlement agreement. Brooklyn wrote it herself, offering to drop the case in exchange for the woman sending proof that she’d deleted the accounts in Brooklyn’s name and returning the driver’s license. She sent the agreement by email, and the woman responded by signing the agreement. But she didn’t follow through. Brooklyn had expected that. But part of her motivation was that she wanted the woman to know she knew everything. And now that the woman didn’t uphold the agreement, Brooklyn submitted a motion to the court to enforce it, and that motion was recently approved.

The Emotional Side of this Identity Theft Story

At the beginning, Brooklyn was obsessed. She checked jail bookings all the time hoping the thief had been arrested. She checked her email and court system records at all hours. Paying money to pull criminal records, creating fake accounts on different platforms to see if there was an account in her name – Brooklyn wanted so badly to find a resolution to her identity theft story that she became obsessed. But she eventually realized that wasn’t the best option mentally or emotionally. She had nightmares and was plagued by fears that the woman would make the threat physical.

After a lot of therapy and work, she realized that the less obsessed she was with the situation, the more effective she could be at actually taking care of herself and protecting herself. Currently she pulls her credit reports once a month and disputes anything she doesn’t recognize. She also highly endorses USPS informed delivery and checks it every morning. She’s signed up for identity theft protection services and services that let her know when someone searches any of her information. This monitoring gives her peace of mind without letting her fall into obsession. The mental and emotional effects can become even worse than the financial ones if you let it take over your mind.

The less obsessed I became over it, the more effective ways of taking care of myself and my credit and my identity became.

Brooklyn Lyon

A Feeling of Violation

A lot of identity theft is criminals pretending to be you just enough to get access to your money or your credit. But in Brooklyn’s case, this criminal was pretending to be her in more personal ways. The woman has gone as far as editing photos of herself to look more like Brooklyn and dying her hair like Brooklyn’s.

At first, Brooklyn was almost offended that this woman was trying to be her. But then she realized that the driver’s license the woman had still had her maiden name and a photo from when she was eighteen. Back then, she didn’t know what she was doing in life and was going through some difficult times. Brooklyn is now married and have a new name and in some ways a different life, while this woman is pretending to be her eighteen-year-old self. In a way, it’s a bit like mourning that past self every day.

It does upset Brooklyn that at the end of the day, the thief doesn’t care about her as a person. She knows why she’s doing it, and she’s had to come to terms with a lot of things through this identity theft story. But it still upsets her at how this woman could do this to another woman, especially during these frightening times. We should be leaning on each other, and yet this woman is out here hurting people.

An End to the Identity Theft Story

At this point, Brooklyn can see an end to her identity theft story. For a while, it felt like going to a crime scene every time she got into her car. She questioned her career choice and changed her hair so many times in an attempt to feel less trapped. But she thinks that once you can say you’ve done everything you can to alleviate the situation, you feel better. And she’s done a lot of that work.

Time also matters. For a long time, Brooklyn couldn’t tell her story without getting emotional about it. One of the signs that makes her think she’s getting to the end of the journey is that she now can tell it and it’s not affecting her as much as it once did. It’s still frustrating every time she uncovers something new the thief has done. It’s hard to predict what identity thieves will do, and she still sometimes finds new things. But it no longer feels like doomsday every time.

You just never know what these [identity thieves] are doing.

Brooklyn Lyon

She hopes someday the thief stops using her identity. But either way, she feels like she’s approaching a point where she can let it go emotionally. A while ago, she was angry that she had to deal with the ramifications and felt that the thief should be the one undoing the damage. That’s why she wrote in the settlement agreement that the thief had to take down the accounts. But she acknowledges that she may not get anything back from it. If she gets anything out of this situation, it will be becoming a better person, and knowing deep in her heart that she will never be a person like that.

Reclaiming Power

Brooklyn’s goal right now is taking back power over her circumstances. This identity theft story will become a part of her past. She gets to move on, and eventually the thief will have to deal with the consequences. Brooklyn does sometimes catch herself thinking about the thief as a person. The woman is constantly scared and running from the law. At the end of the day, it’s obvious that she’s sad and wants something out of her life. Brooklyn’s main hope for her is that her kids are protected.

Brooklyn shares her story to hopefully give insight into what it’s like to live through and deal with identity theft. She is also aware that people who don’t look or sound like her might night have had such positive experiences interacting with law enforcement, so she hopes sharing her hard-learned advice will help them, too. Unfortunately, right now, these kinds of situations are normal. She hopes one day they won’t be.

Unfortunately, this is normal, and hopefully one day it won’t be.

Brooklyn Lyon