Me and my wife recently found out that her daughter (my step-daughter, though I consider her close enough to my own after having raised her for 18 years) has taken out about $60,000 in loan debt under our name, without our permission. For some basic context, she took out a Parent Plus Loan for school, under our name and social security number, without asking us. In her first semester of her Freshman Year, she did come to us, asking if we would fill out the paperwork for her, since her school's loans were only for about $5000 for the whole year. We explained that we didn't have the financial means to take out a loan for the amount she was requesting; about $14,000 a year, but offered to help her find scholarships or work-study, and other ways to potentially help her cover her costs. After me and her applied for about 5-10 scholarships, and she got a part-time job, she never came back to me and my wife with any financial aid concerns again, so we figured that she had largely figured it up. We brought up tuition a couple times, but every time we'd ask, she'd just say that she was able to cover it all, and didn't need any help with it or anything.

Come us, a couple years down the road. We've gotten a letter from the Department of Education saying that 'our' loan has gone into default, and has been so for about a year at this point. We reach out to her school and, after a little bit of digging, we discover that after we had told her "no" on the loan, she had gone around our back and applied for it all online. She filled in her own contact information instead of our own, and the loan went through just fine, since she had the correct Social Security Numbers and all. We've spoken with the school and the DoE a fair amount about this already, and we basically have 2 options for this. We can either eat the loan, and pay it all back ourselves (something not at all financially feasible for my family, since we have about $40k in Medical Debt on top of this now), or to go through the state to press charges on each one of the 5 loans she's taken out; each loan being over $10,000, making this a Felony in my state with a minimum prison sentence. At this point, I'm not certain what my family *can* do. We don't have the money to be able to pay this loan back, but me and my wife are emotionally wrecked at even the thought of pressing charges against our own daughter. So, here's the important question, reddit: if I press charges here, AITA?

Edit: Since there's a little bit of confusion, a bit of clarification. A Plus Loan is a loan that we would take out in our own name, to give her extra funds for education. Because we would ordinarily be the ones taking it out, she's not involved with the Repayment Process at all; she's not even technically eligible to make payments towards it, since it's under our own name.