Karen Palmer

And we would have to come clean and throw ourselves on their mercy, basically.

At Social Security, we got this other woman, and I had laid out our documents, our original birth certificates and the phony ones, and she kind of swept everything up and said, I can refer you for criminal prosecution for fraud, and I might do that.

And it was okay in the end, but it was nerve-wracking.

And I think she decided not to try to seek criminal charges because...

We didn't do anything to defraud anybody.

You know, that's sort of the criteria.

Like, did you do it to get out of paying taxes?

Did you do it to swindle somebody in some kind of a business deal?

Did you do it to skip out on your credit card debt?

We had always gone way in the other direction.

Like, when we filed our taxes, we didn't take the deductions we were entitled to because we were afraid of drawing attention to ourselves.

So it wasn't like we owed money anywhere.

And I think they finally looked at us and said, okay, we're going to let this go.