In early spring of 2021, Clare Seal, an American citizen, decided to finally give up her dream of traveling the world and starting over in an effort to get her finances back on track. She had been working in the finance industry for five years, ever since her divorce from a partner who’d paid her off and left her with a credit card with too much debt. She felt like she was drowning in debt, a sense of hopelessness that left her drained of everything she’d worked for during her time of marriage. The realization that her husband would never come home and that she would remain a national identity theft victim forever frightened her. She needed to take action – she needed to find help and reclaim her identity.
So she began her road to financial recovery, searching the internet for help. She came across sites offering searches through US Nationality records and began applying to every county’s records. She sent out hundreds of emails, begging my inbox to be opened so that she could begin the process of getting her name and identity back. I opened every one, hoping that one of them would have the answer she needed – the answer to whether or not her life could be saved. And it did, she got her money!
But her story isn’t quite the norm. There are thousands of other women out there – women whose husbands forgot about them, women whose identity was stolen by another spouse, women who became a victim of identity theft and whose employers forgot to drop her from their rolls. And then there are women like myself, whose employers forgot to verify her SSN (Social Security Number) when she applied for work. These are the stories that deserve the chance to be heard by millions of people and to be found, and to be restored.