The next morning, I froze my credit and called the lender’s fraud department. The home Wi-Fi address alone proved nothing, but the application included an email account I had never created and employment information copied from documents stored in my office—the same office Bennett had turned into his gaming room. I preserved the credit alert, changed every password, and filed an identity-theft report. The lender agreed to stop processing the application while its fraud team reviewed the device and account information connected to it.
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