<prompt> Human: Im sorry if this is in the wrong reddit forum. This is my first post and this is the only r that Ive heard about involving finance.My mom is not a native and can barely speak English so my sister has mainly been helping for around 10 years. Four years ago she moved out with her husband and now two kids. But a year after moving out, she started doing some extremely iffy stuff according to her husband. She would be gone weeks on end eventually months without contact. Apparently she was going to school to be a pharmacist, going to New York for studies, and working at an island nearby doing residency-type stuff. Turns out it was all lies and she was just going off gambling away everything and obviously losing every single cent of it. Her husband and his family dolled out over 10k some of which included having to sell off jewelry and such in order to help her in this debt and weve dolled out over 3k. Shes also randomly been coming over and asking us for even more money and even for our car before we truly knew what was going on. She has completely left her husband and kids and everyone has lost contact with her. We dont even know where she lives. Ive only recently got into the financial loop.Anyways, fast forward to about three months ago and we get a letter from the IRS saying that my mom owes over 12k to the IRS. I asked my mom if shes done anything to screw with her credit and she essentially told me no, she wouldnt do that. Even now she makes regular payments on a current credit card. I then called around and it turns out there were multiple credits cards under her name that were settled over a decade and the difference the 12k is now being charged under the IRS. Since she has a low income, she only needs to pay 3k of it. However, since she has a low income, she cant realistically pay that along with her current bills and come out financially stable. I also dont want her credit score to be this irreparable since credit could help us a lot in our financial situation.Since my sister was the only one with complete trust of my moms financial situation and because of this knowledge of her horrible gambling spree, I know that she must have opened up all these credit cards under my moms name over the years and took cash advances in order to lose them all in her gambling addiction. Her credit score is just no longer possible to do anything with. Remember me saying that my mom is still making payments on a credit card? Yeah, it turns out my sister was the one who tanked this one too. It has been overdrawn to over 3.5k and my moms making slow payments that essentially only eradicates 50 at most per month because of interest.My mother is a loving, devoted person though no matter the situation and does not want to rat her out. I, on the other hand, do not want her to be this horribly screwed when my sister should be taking the hit that she cold-heartily created this herself. My mom has already talked to her tax accountant and made a 200 payment to the IRS. Now is the second month of the payment and she wants me to do the payments from now on and Im extremely reluctant to do so. I dont want this to go any further!What can I do to rectify this horrible, horrible situation? I dont have solid evidence of my sister doing this to my mother and its already been over a decade of this nonsense going on. My mom already made a payment so will that make it even harder to remove all this debt and her terrible credit score? Since my sister has been handling all the financial and business stuff with my mother, Im also afraid that she knows all of my familys social security numbers and will ruin us as well if we try to build up credit for our future. This includes my brother, two nephews, niece, and obviously her own two children. Is it possible that shes already done something even though we have no credit history at all? It doesnt pull up anything when I check up on my own credit report online.Any advice would be greatly appreciated on how to proceed forward.  <response>: first off, file a police report.secondly, your mother needs to obtain a credit report and find everything that she didnt do and call them and ask to talk to their fraudcriminal departments and let them know her identity was stolen. If you are unwilling to file a police report against your sister and do everything in your power to put her behind bars, then she will continue to do this.Your mom doesnt owe anything obviously and shouldnt pay anything. She needs to get her financial house in order though bc your sister created a massive mess for her. also, consider getting some identity protection insurance like Lifelock for her. 