We've all been there: The bills are piling up, there's too much month left and not enough money, and the kind of credit card offers you get tend to feature words like "secured Visa" and "19 percent APR." And there's your kid, all shining and pristine without a mark on his credit report….why not just send in one of those offers in his name?
Okay, I have never been quite that desperate/skeevy. I'd guess the rest of you haven't either. But it's apparently not all that uncommon for parents or stepparents to "borrow" their child's identity to get credit in their name. Often, the fraud isn’t discovered until the child applies for a job, drive's license or their own credit, only to discover decades-old debts they never ran up.
Only about 5 to 10 percent of kids are victims of identity theft, and half of those are between birth and age 5. Parents or stepparents commit more than two-thirds of such crimes.
In many cases, it is parents who have ruined their own credit who steal their child's identity, but sometimes it's an immigrant parent who needs the Social Security number to get a job, or parents who get into financial trouble and reason that they'll have the debt they rack up in their child's name paid off by the time the child is old enough to discover it.
The sad thing is that kids who are victims of this often don't want to go after their parents for their crimes, so the bad credit follows them around forever. And in some extra-skeevy cases, a parents applies for a job under their child's Social Security number so they can dodge child support.
Moral of the story? Check your kid's identity every now and again.
