Esther Reed
Esther Reed a former Extension student was sentenced to four years in prison by a Federal court, earlier this year. She used mental illness as an excuse to steal up to six identities.
She attended Harvard between 2002 and 2005 sporadically according to the New York Post. She used the identities to forge her way into Extension School at Columbia and California State University, Fullerton. Reed was at the time labeled as a scheming manipulative criminal by the federal judge according to the Associated Press.
Her crime was unravelled when she applied for a job in Manhattan in 2006, using one of her persona’s Brook Henson, a woman who had been missing since 1999 in South Carolina. In 2007 she was indicted in Greenville S.C. for charges of fraud, wire fraud, and identity theft, the Crimson was told in an interview with Ed Donovan a secret Service spokesman.
Reed was put on the Secret Service’s Most Wanted List in 2007, Donovan said as they investigate major cases of fraud, while also defending key government figures.
Natalie M. Bowman ’99 who later graduated from Columbia Medical School was also a target of Reed who attempted to adopt her identity.
Her defence of mental illness which was said to be caused by the 1998 death of her mother, was backed by her attorney’s Ann Fitz.
Fitz said : “She felt like there was no other choice but to try and hide herself and live her life through somebody else’s identity,” Fitz was also disappointed at the final verdict claiming it dismissed mental illness as a “creative argument.”
But her scams were seen as an effort to support herself after she left home in 1999, said Walt Wilkins a prosecutor and U.S. attorney for the district of South Carolina. Wilkins said that Reed also put herself in social situations despite her defence of “social anxiety disorders.”
Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in the nation and now also internationally thanks to the Internet.