I opened the VA email standing in the Ferris wheel line, and there it was. Per your request, we have updated your mailing address and direct deposit information for survivor benefits. I never made that request. And the new bank account at the bottom belonged to someone who signs her emails Mon.
My daughter-in-law Monica had used my sons keys, left with her while he is deployed in Iraq, to get into my house. But she did far more than empty my refrigerator in the dark. She had called the power company pretending to be me, using my Social Security number and my date of birth, to shut off my service and open a new account. And she had redirected my late husband Calvins VA survivor benefits, earned over two tours in Vietnam, into her own bank account.
Having my sons keys is not permission, and I told the officer so. My son left his keys with his wife to water plants and check the mail, not to steal his mothers identity and his fathers benefits.
Impersonating me to the government to steal a veterans survivor benefits is not a family squabble. It is federal, and it does not get smaller because she married my son.
I reported it to the Little Rock police, to Entergy, and to the VA. Using someone elses Social Security number to redirect federal benefits is identity theft and benefits fraud, and the VA does not treat that lightly. The benefits were frozen, then restored to me. The power came back on. The new account in Mons name became evidence.
I reached my son through the Red Cross. When he understood what his wife had done to his mother and with his fathers name, he was sick about it. What happens in that marriage is theirs to sort, but he told me plainly he was on my side.
I changed the locks, so my sons keys, wherever they are, open nothing of mine. I paid two hundred forty-four thousand for that little brick house to be three blocks from my grandbabies, and I am still three blocks from my grandbabies, and Monica is a good deal farther from my refrigerator.