Home

Child Identity Theft

May 17 2011

Child Identity Theft: New Evidence Indicates Identity Thieves are Targeting Children for Unused Social Security Numbers

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In the cyber-centric world of the 21st Century, parents have many risks and threats to ponder as they attempt to provide a safe present and a secure future for their children. Each day, a new danger seems to capture the headlines, from exposure to online predators to the cyber-bullying by schoolmates.

Meanwhile, those parents are looking over their own shoulders, careful to guard against the crime of identity theft, so that they can continue to provide that safe present, and to build that secure future. Well, it just got worse.

Because, as this report suggests, it is possible that you could be quite effective at warding off online predators and cyber-bullies, as well as proving quite successful at guarding your own hardearned good credit, only to find that your child’s identity has been violated, and your family’s financial and emotional well-being threatened in an almost inconceivable way.

What would you do if your child was in foreclosure on a home in another state? Wouldn’t you want to
know if your child had run up a huge utility bill across town?

These are not theoretical questions, these are reallife questions that the parents and guardians of children in this report have been forced to come to grips with. In Child Identity Theft, you will find a hard look at what child identity theft means, including an analysis of over 4,000 incidents of child identity theft, and the actual stories of several victims. The report also lists recommendations for preventative measures that should be taken by both public and private sector institutions, as well as protective steps for parents to take directly.

Read Full: Child Identity Theft

PDF format, 389KB, 20Pages.

By Richard Power,
Distinguished Fellow, Carnegie Mellon CyLab

KEY POINTS INCLUDE
1 First large child ID theft report ever published, based on identity protection scans of over 40,000 U.S. children.

2 Unused Social Security numbers are uniquely valuable as thieves can pair them with any name and birth date. This is particularly useful for illegal immigration.

3 A child’s identity is a blank slate, and the probability of discovery is low, as the child will not be using it for a long period of time. Parents typically don’t monitor their children’s identities.

4 The potential impact on the child’s future is profound; it could destroy or damage a child’s ability to win approval on student loans, acquire a mobile phone, obtain a job or secure a place to live.

5 The primary drivers for such attacks are illegal immigration (e.g., to obtain false IDs for employment), organized crime (e.g., to engage in financial fraud) and friends and family (e.g., to circumvent bad credit ratings, etc.). ...

Comments (0) add comment