The bank found the account in about nine minutes. It had been opened in 2019 using my maiden name, and the address on file was an apartment building I had never lived in. The account had received exactly $1,100 every month since 2022, always from an account connected to my name, but the transfers weren’t coming from my current checking account. They were coming from an older account I’d forgotten about after my husband and I changed banks.
I asked the bank for the original account-opening documents, and the representative told me there was something unusual about them. The signature on the application looked like mine, but the handwriting was slightly different, especially the way the last few letters of my name were formed. I asked whether someone could have opened the account using my identity, but she said the records showed the account had been opened in person and that the person who opened it had presented identification that matched the information on file.
I didn’t tell my daughter what I’d found yet. Instead, I went home and searched through an old box of financial papers I’d kept after my husband died. At the bottom was a bank statement from 2019 for an account I didn’t remember having. The first deposit was only twenty dollars, followed by several small withdrawals, and then nothing for almost three years. In 2022, the $1,100 transfers began. I kept looking through the statements until I found a photocopy of the signature card, and that’s when I realized the account hadn’t been opened for my daughter at all.
It had been opened in my name, but with a second person listed as an authorized signer. I recognized that name immediately. It belonged to someone my daughter had known long before she met her husband, someone I hadn’t heard mentioned in years. I called the bank and asked whether that person was still connected to the account. There was a long pause before the representative answered, and then she said something that made me sit down: “Ma’am, he’s not an authorized signer anymore. He was removed from the account three months before the payments to your daughter started.”
