Adult Child Says Their Dad Took Out a $25,000 Loan in Their Name — Then Called Them Like It Was Just a Courtesy Heads-Up
In a Reddit post, an adult child said their estranged father suddenly called one Friday with news that made them feel sick. According to the post, they barely spoke to him except around Christmas because of his history of domestic violence when they were growing up. So the call already felt strange. Then he told them that the previous year he had taken out a $25,000 loan in their name to pay off his own credit cards. Now he had run those cards back up again, could not make the loan payments, and wanted to “give them a heads up” that they might be sued by the lender.
The poster wrote that what hit almost as hard as the fraud itself was how casually he said it. In the post, they said he never apologized for taking out the loan in their name. He did not sound ashamed or panicked. Instead, he told them that if the lender came after them, they should just say they had been hacked. That was the moment everything shifted from family betrayal into full identity theft. The father was not confessing because he felt guilty. He was warning them because the consequences were about to land in their life instead of his.
They said they checked their credit right after the call and found exactly what he had described. Their score had tanked by around 250 points since the previous summer. There were five missed payments on the account and about $24,000 still owed. The timing made it even worse: they were about to buy a house. In the post, they said they could technically pay off the loan in cash, but the thought of doing that for a debt they never chose felt unbearable. More than anything, they sounded shocked that their father had not only done it, but had let it run long enough to destroy their credit before saying a word.
A few months later, they returned with an update after deciding not to take the hit quietly. They said they filed a police report, received a case number, and disputed the fraudulent account with the credit bureaus. Not long after that, a man showed up at their house and served them with a lawsuit from the lender anyway. The account had dropped off their credit report and their score had shot back up, but the company still seemed to be trying to get a judgment against them, apparently hoping they would not fight back. The poster wrote that it felt surreal to be dealing with court over something their own father had done to them.
They said that before the court date they filed a FOIA request and got the actual police report. At the first hearing, the lender’s lawyer offered to settle for $15,000. The poster handed over the police report instead. According to the update, the lawyer’s attitude changed quickly after that. He said he would send the report to the company and asked for a continuance, but told the poster to still show up for the next date. By the time the second hearing came around, the lawyer was not even there. A motion to dismiss had already been filed, and the case was effectively over.
By the end of the update, the poster said the loan issue appeared resolved, the debt had dropped off, and they were in closing on a house. The one thing they still could not undo was the fact that the lawsuit existed in public records search results. But the real story was already clear: their father had stolen their identity, wrecked their credit, and only bothered to mention it once he could no longer keep the payments up himself.
