Strollerderby : identity theft

Your Kid's Identity Is at Risk

JeanneSager — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:01:00 GMT

Identity theft may be the hot topic at many a dinner party, but it might be time to start talking social security numbers on the playground.

Because hackers have turned their eyes toward our kids, making them the number one target of identity theft.

According to a recent article in Hitched, kids identities are the fastest growing sector for theft, and because kids aren't generally USING their own identities (not in the sense of a credit identity anyway), it can go unnoticed for years.

Just think, when was the last time you had to haul out your child's social security number for anything? Besides our yearly tax filing, I can count on one hand the number of times I've used it since she was born, and each time I've had to pull out the card to check the digits. Where we as parents can keep close tabs on our credit card bills to monitor any odd spending, most kids don't have bills coming to the house. Even kids' savings accounts are less likely to be monitored by adults - chiefly because we don't use them for anything other than holding money, which we'll check in oh, about eighteen years when the first tuition bill arrives.

No wonder the FTC has found half a million child identities are stolen every year, a number they expect to rise. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, more than half of those children whose identities were corrupted were under the age of six. Late last year, a study from Javelin Strategy and Research estimated one in twenty kids overall have been victimized. They've rung up an average of $12,000 in wrongly assigned debt.

Foster kids are a major target too. Shuttled in and out of homes, their most secret information is an open book shared with hundreds of adults, and not always the most trustworthy types. They're also more likely to come out of homes where parents have fallen on hard times, parents who used their identity with the best of intentions. A mom who couldn't get an electric company to allow her to open an account in her name, for example, uses her child's name and social security number to try to keep lights on for the family. But when she can't get a job and fails to pay the bills, the black marks grow on the child's credit.

With the grim economic picture, that's a factor that's spreading to more and more homes. The economy is no doubt having an affect on the numbers of desperate people looking for a clean slate.

Makes you want to run out and order your child's credit report, doesn't it? You should. Hitched has a list of other tips to protect your kids here. Will you be making some changes?

Image: Dr Bulldog

Parents Sue School for Checking for Sex Offenders

JeanneSager — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:06:00 GMT

And the short-sighted parent of the year award goes to . . . two Texas parents who are suing their child's school because they're required to show their driver's license before being allowed access to a building full of children. The horrors, I know.

Yvonne and Larry Meadows say their rights are being violated by a program that compares would-be school visitors' driver's licenses to a database of registered sex offenders.

Yvonne says she's been told she'll be denied entrance to Bee Cave Elementary School unless she hands over her license. That, she said, puts her private information at risk. Besides, the Meadows' told the Austin American-Statesman they are guaranteed the freedom to associate with their children at school.

I'm kind of perplexed here. The school is a government agency, as is the department of motor vehicles - which provides the driver's license. Any information being picked up in the scans should already be in the system, which makes it hard to see how parents are suffering identity theft. Granted the school has contracted with a private company to do the checks, but several states contract with private companies to issue driver's licenses.

The license, by the way, isn't a guaranteed right. It's a privilege - which can be revoked. As is the so-called "right" to visit a school. At my daughter's pre-school, no one is allowed entrance unless they are recognized as a parent of one of the students or show some ID and a clear reason for being present. Even my in-laws had to present the teacher with identification to pick up their granddaughter. Hers is a private pre-school, but I'd like to think a public school would have a similar policy.

Public schools are the places where we send our children during the day, expecting them to return to us in the same shape in which they left. We put our trust in them to keep our kids safe, and protection from pedophiles ranks high on that list. I would think the Meadowses would prefer a little hassle at the door to having their child touched by a kiddie rapist (not a threat, merely an awful, disgusting fact of life). In the post-Columbine era, most schools have locked all but one entrance and placed someone there to monitor ingress and egress anyway. They reserve the right to turn anyone away. As a reporter, I quickly learned to bring both my press pass and driver's license with me to the doorway lest I be sent back to my car and end up late to my interview. At times, my ID has been taken for me to claim on the way out - the school's way of ensuring people check in before they leave, so they can tell who is in the building and when.

Is this any different? Would you feel violated if you were asked to provide ID or feel like your kids were a little safer?

Image: WRAL

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3-Year-Old Girl's Identity Stolen

SunnyChanel — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 03:43:00 GMT

If your toddler starts getting collection notices from telephone and gas services, don’t think that it’s a result of them trying to ‘pitch in’ and help pay the family bills. It’s sadly much more likely that they are a victim of identity theft. According to the AP, this is what happened to a 3-year old girl. A 44-year old man in Mebane, North Carolina allegedly abused her Social Security number.

What brought this to light was the girl’s grandmother contacting the authorities after the family started to get collection notices to in the toddler’s name. But it wasn’t a total sticky fingered stranger, apparently the suspect is a related to the girl. Let’s here it for family, glad they're not mine.

Source

Money Tight? No Conscience? Tap the Kids!

Amy Kuras — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:03:00 GMT

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.

Does Your Kid Have Bad Credit?

Karen Murphy — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 19:55:00 GMT

Identity theft: if you've ever experienced this you know how devastating it is and what a huge pain it is to repair. But it's news to me that identity theft isn't limited to adults (because I live in a Happy Bubble); the identities of minors can be stolen as well. Imagine your kid turning 18 and finding out he's already thousands of dollars in debt! Except it wasn't your kid, it was someone else posing as your kid and using his social security number and name to rack up debts and bad credit.

Experts say the best way to avoid this is to (duh) avoid giving out your kid's social security number like it was candy. Except everybody and their brother asks for it nowadays: doctors, schools, etc. Do they really need that information? Be sure there's a valid reason before you give it out. Like you don't already know that. Also, receiving credit card bills in your kid's name is a sure tipoff that something's amiss. Except by then it's obviously too late and then you've got a fight and a lot of paperwork on your hands to fix it.

The Identity Theft Resource Center is working on legislation that would help protect the social security numbers of minors. It would provide credit bureaus with a list of social security numbers belonging to children under 18, which theoretically would be cross-checked against applications for credit. But I won't hold my breath.