Imagine being married without your consent to a complete stranger and only to find out a few years later that your son’s birth certificate reflects the stranger’s surname. This is the very real story of Reiger Park resident Elize O’Brien.
O’Brien was married to a complete stranger in 2006. Although she is not married, she raised four children. When she went to collect her child’s birth certificate at Boksburg Home Affairs she found out she had been legally married:
“He’s here, and this is my son’s birth certificate and I don’t know how this happened because he is on his father’s surname. I want a divorce, I want this guy out of my life. I want my name clean, even from my son’s certificate, I want it off,” she says.
The waiting is also taking its toll on her partner of 10 years: “She is stressed out, I am stressed out. I want to get married to her because we have been together for a long time now,” says her partner, Hendry Kelly.
O’Brien is among the victims’ endless list, familiar to law expert Philippa Kruger: “There are a lot of women who have fallen prey to this kind of scam. I haven’t come across a man who has fallen prey to this kind of scam”
But perhaps there is no need to panic for O’Brien: “In the records of about 56 million people that we keep we do have a situation where there is bound to be errors, there is bound to be fraudulent transactions,” says Home Affairs Director General, Thulani Mavuso.
An employee who allegedly authorised the transaction is believed to have resigned years ago.
“If they have left the department, we will be able to take action against that person because these are the things that bring the name of the department into disrepute. So we are cabbing all those elements, that is why we introduced a bio-chem system which enables us to prevent that fraud moving forward,” adds Mavuso.
Investigations are underway, until the department concludes the probe before next Friday. The family’s long overdue wedding remains on hold.
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