Filed under: Identity Theft, Credit Reports, Consumer Issues, Consumer Protection, Credit Repair
As if parents didn’t have enough on their minds, now they have to worry about making sure their offspring aren’t in the crosshairs of financial scammers. According to AllClear ID, an identity-theft protection company, children are 35 times more likely than adults to be identity theft victims.
It’s hard to nail down exactly how pervasive the crime really is.
Erik Larson, president and founder of NextAdvisor.com, a company that analyzes identity-theft protection products, says between 2.5 percent and 10 percent of Americans under age 18 have had their identity stolen.
And according to a recent report by AllClear based on a survey of 27,000 financial records between September 2010 and December 2011, nearly 11 percent of kids had their personal information stolen. “The reason the data on this is incomplete is that people often don’t know an identity theft has taken place,” says Larson. “They don’t realize it for years sometimes.”
The way most young people find out they have been victimized is that they turn 18 and apply for their first job, first credit card, or a student loan and discover they already have bad credit.
“In the Boston area, a 17-year-old applied for a job and the employer pulled his credit,” says Larson. “It turned out someone had used his Social Security number and bought a $47,000 houseboat and then defaulted on the loan. The boat had been purchased when he was just 7 years old.”
A Different Sort of Crime Family
Larson says that 27 percent of all identity theft victims know their perpetrator: someone in their family, a co-worker, or a friend. That number may be higher for child victims.
“It happens unfortunately far too often that a parent, stepparent, uncle, or, almost worst of all, a foster parent will steal a Social Security number from a child to open new credit card accounts or to establish a new utility company account,” says Larson. “Foster kids are particularly vulnerable because they’re in and out of many homes.”
In one case in New Jersey, a mother stole the Social Security numbers of each of her five children to open credit card accounts and then didn’t pay the bills, says Larson. Someone who knew her tipped off the police and she was arrested for fraud.
Even if you catch the family member, there may be more damage to come.
Larson says that sometimes a Social Security number will be sold to a network of criminals and new problems can crop up over the years, including even a criminal record associated with your child’s identity.
According to AllClear, one victim’s Social Security number had been used to open more than 40 accounts, in which more than $1 million had been fraudulently charged.
Cleaning Up …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance