Hi r/personalfinance. I'm new here and my parents/school never taught me anything about finances, so I'm turning to you. I literally don't even know how credit cards work, to be honest.
I was filing my taxes this morning and saw that TurboTax allows you to check your credit score, so just for curiosity's sake, I decided to check. I figured it'd be like 0 or nonexistent or something, since I have never opened a credit card or had one opened for me.
Or so, I thought. To my surprise, I found out that my credit score was very low! Someone opened a Capital One credit card in my name on March 30th, 2002 and wracked up $9.3k of credit card debt.
I think one of my parents did it, but I don't know which one. They divorced in 2006. My mother died last summer, and I've been trying to contact my father about it but he isn't answering me. I feel really angry and confused. What can I do?
EDIT: I just got off the phone with my father and he confirmed that he was the one who opened the credit card. I'm 21 years old, I was 5 years old when the card was opened. He says that "opening the card for me was a good decision because it established my credit." Um, okay, but there's debt in my name that I didn't even know about until this morning.
He says he's going to pay the debt, but he doesn't have a steady income. His business is failing. He has terrible spending habits. We have a hard enough time paying for me to attend university - he's been late on every single tuition payment so far. My father is just generally sketchy.
Part of me wants to report this to Capital One, but I'm worried my dad will get fined for money he doesn't have, or worse, go to jail. I don't want to be responsible for that. I have no idea what to do.
Submitted April 10, 2019 at 11:32AM by AggravatingCelery5 http://bit.ly/2IbE03N
