Protect Your Children’s Identity from Being Stolen
Protect Your Children’s Identity from Being Stolen
Can you imagine a pre-schooler owning a car and having debts amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars? And think of a teenager having a yacht and lots of credit.
These cases are real according to NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit. A lot of children are growing up having debts because their identities were stolen. The bad effects on these children with stolen identity are bad credit, bad background, loan that were defaulted and lost opportunities. It also costs families of these children $13 billion every year.
The researchers believe that these people who are stealing children identities are involved in an organized crime and illegal immigration. They target the social security number, birthdates and other vital information that could be used.
Identity theft of children below five years old has increased by 105% versus last year according to the research made by AllClear ID.
The CyLab of Carnegie Mellon University has conducted a study which shows that 10.2 % of the 43,000 children they checked had their identity stolen. The CyLab study was the first to conduct the first large scale study on stolen identity of children. While the 10.2% may seem a small percentage, this is 51 times than the stolen identity of adults according to CyLab.
One of the victims is ten- year-old Reilly Dennedy. Reilly’s mother said that the identity of his child was stolen 11 years before Reilly was born. It was easy for the thieves to use social security numbers because the numbers are released sequentially. At present the social security numbers are not anymore released sequentially.
It was found out by Dennedy with the help of police that one thief used Reilly’s name to acquire credit and another used her social security number to put up a utility account.
According to Cylab, the thieves used the stolen identity to buy large items like homes, cars, boats and even to get loans and employment.
The victims have never found out who stole their identity.
Dennedy is the Chief Privacy Officer at Mcdee. He is also the founder of The Identity Project, a website which educates people on how to avoid identity theft. But it is ironic that his family is a victim of this theft. He said he never thought it could happen to his family.
The crime is fast growing because not enough penalties are imposed on those who are involved in the crime, according to Dennedy. Parents have to be very careful in protecting their children’s identities including the infants.
The CyLab recommends that
* Creditors must do careful and detailed background checking.
* Parents should secure safely the social security number of their children.
* Parents should educate their children at early age about Cyber security and to secure and protect their social security number.
* The cyber risk of children should be checked regularly to find out whether their identities are secured and not stolen.
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Filed under: bad credit • Credit • Credit Score • Personal Finance • personal loans
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