Stealing Your Child’s Identity
A child is not immune to identity theft. In many ways, using a child’s identity has inherent benefits. For example, a young child will not have a criminal record, will not have debts like mortgages and student loans, will not be doing a credit check soon and possibly will not find out about the crime for years and years.
Brian O’Connor suggest some ways to protect a child’s identity:
“… Check to see if any of the credit bureaus have a file opened on your child. There should be no activity.”
link to the article by Brian J. O’Connor for The Detroit News
To add to the list of suggestions, if the child is old enough to be on the computer, he/she should be aware of security online. It is simple – don’t give out personal information to strangers online.
Catherine Forsythe
3 Comments
Tammy McDaniel (@tammymcdaniel)
October 27th, 2009
at 9:49am
Another tip is to never supply your child’s social security number on paper forms. Doctor offices, schools, churches, have them on file and you don’t need to risk the number by supplying it on a paper form. Recently on a church field trip a youth leader lost a folder with every students personal information (53 children) including social security number. Surprising parents didn’t seem outraged. I was a little, but I never put my childs SSN on the form. The article mentions the reasons why someone would want to steal the child’s identity, but also they can wait until a child develops great credit.
Khürt Williams
October 27th, 2009
at 9:53am
How does one request a credit report on another person? Can I just call up Experian and ask for a credit report on anyone’s SSN?
hotrao
October 29th, 2009
at 7:02am
I think that children are, as always and unfortunately the perfect targets for evil people.
On the other side, I’m quite sure that, though early access to IT is something desirable, on the other side, this could and should happen always with adult supervision, or, at least with limited activity possibility.
Of course you can manage to tell to young people not to do something, but is not a “bulletproof” solution.
The risk is exposing children to those risks that are not evaluable. For me, IMHO, my little daughter will have access only through incremental steps of freedom.