A man in Ohio had been accused of making false claims that he was a missing child. A federal grand jury has now accused him and indicted him on one count of aggravated identity theft and two others for making false statements.
When you think of identity theft, you might think of stealing a credit card or pretending to be someone else online. Most people assume it’s a digital crime. However, in this case, it was a 23-year-old man who claimed he was another person; A boy that had gone missing at 14.
He told authorities that he was abducted at the age of six and wanted to go home. He claimed he had run away from a hotel room where he’d been physically abused and sexually assaulted, held in captivity by two men.
The authorities ran a DNA test and discovered that the man was not the missing boy at all. After finding this out, it was revealed that the man had previously claimed to be a juvenile sex trafficking victim twice before. This time, he only admitted to the action when he was confronted by the authorities with the results of the DNA test.
The man will now be detained until his trial. It’s not clear what his goal was in claiming another person’s identity.
Cases like this one are heartbreaking for the parents and unusual to say the least. Regardless, anyone who commits or is accused of committing identity theft does deserve the right to a fair trial and solid defense. Your attorney can help you, even if you’ve made mistakes in the past.