Identity Theft Defense In Michigan

Identity Is Easy to Confuse, Hard to Prove

An IP address, a shared computer, a card number used by a family member, or a name attached to an account does not prove who was at the keyboard. Identity theft requires that you knowingly used someone else’s information with intent to defraud, and that is a far higher bar than simply showing a loss occurred. Account access is often shared, devices are often shared, and the person charged is not always the person who acted. Hackett pulls apart the digital trail the state relies on and tests whether it really points at you.

When the Case Goes Federal

Identity theft frequently rides alongside federal charges like wire fraud, mail fraud, or aggravated identity theft, which can carry a mandatory consecutive prison term. The procedures, the agents, and the sentencing exposure are all different in federal court. If you suspect you are under investigation, the smartest move is to bring Hackett in before any charge is filed, while there is still room to shape or even head off the case.

What the Act Prohibits, and What It Allows as a Defense

Under MCL 445.65(1), it is unlawful to use or attempt to use another person’s identifying information, with intent to defraud or violate the law, to obtain credit, goods, services, money, property, a vital record, a confidential telephone record, medical records or information, or employment, or to commit another unlawful act. The same applies where a person does so by concealing, withholding or misrepresenting their identity.

The Act then writes defenses into itself, which is unusual and useful. Subsection (2) allows a person charged under the concealment branch to assert that they gave a bona fide gift for the benefit or use of the person whose information was used, or that they acted in otherwise lawful pursuit or enforcement of a person’s legal rights, including an investigation. The burden on those is a preponderance of the evidence rather than anything higher.

A Ladder That Climbs Steeply, and Can Be Stacked

MCL 445.69(1) makes a first violation a felony punishable by up to 5 years and a fine of up to $25,000. A second is up to 10 years and $50,000. A third or subsequent is up to 15 years and $75,000. No dollar threshold appears anywhere in that ladder: it climbs on the number of violations rather than on the amount involved.

Two further provisions compound it. Subsection (3) states that the section does not prohibit charging or sentencing a person for any other violation committed using the information obtained, so the fraud carried out with the identity is charged separately. Subsection (4) then permits the court to order that a term under this section run consecutively to the sentence for that other offense.

The section also applies whether the person whose information was used is alive or deceased. Taken together, an allegation involving one person’s details can produce several counts, an enhanced tier, and sentences stacked on top of one another, which is why how many separate violations the evidence genuinely supports is worth contesting from the beginning.

Proving Who Did It

The hardest thing to establish in an identity case is usually the identity of the person who used the information. These cases are built from records of transactions conducted remotely, and a name, an address or a device associated with an account is not proof of who was operating it.

That is particularly true where the information belonged to a relative or someone in the same household, which is how a great many of these cases arise. Access to documents is easy to demonstrate and use is much harder, and where several people had the same access the evidence often points at an address rather than at a person.

A case can also be charged federally, where the framework and the sentencing differ. Because the Michigan ladder climbs on the number of violations rather than on amounts, and because sentences can be ordered to run consecutively, how many distinct violations the evidence genuinely supports is worth contesting before anything is resolved.