I’m very excited to be finally able to talk about the Child Identity Theft Study. This research, performed by Javelin, analyzed 500 children (ages 17 and under) who were enrolled in Debix between mid-July and mid-August. We were amazed to discover that 26 kids had credit reports where none of them should have one at all. That’s 5% or in other worlds, if you walk into your average elementary school, that’s one kid in every single classroom, whom already has their credit messed up in some way. Other key findings include:

• The study discovered 5% of the children had one or more credit reports using their social security number (SSN), and 54% of those children were victims of identity theft.

• Among those 5%, the children had on average $12,779 in fraudulent or wrongly assigned debt.

• While the study found that children were more likely to find problems in their credit histories as they aged, an astonishing 12% of those with problems were age 5 and under.

• A handful of cases stand out as especially severe: one child had seven identities listed under his SSN, with several thousand dollars in medical bills, apartment rentals, and credit accounts in collections; another child’s SSN was associated with over $325,000 in debt.

• One in four victims in the study has bills or lines of credit in collections or foreclosure, while almost two‐thirds of these children had fake or wrong names listed under their SSN.

• 42% of those children with erroneous credit reports only had credit files at one credit bureau, meaning their fraud could have gone unnoticed without checking all three.

Kids are a great target for identity theft, because their credit is a clean slate and the younger you target them, the longer you have before the act will be discovered.  As a result, the corresponding amount of fraud that is committed prior to discover can be significantly higher for children than adults. This of course begs the question, what can you do to protect your children’s identities? At bare minimum we recommend that you do the following:

• Keep your child’s social security number private
• Shred sensitive documents before discarding
• Beware of what sensitive information you (or your children) share
• Keep physical and electronic documents locked up

We’d also love it if you’d buy our child identity protection service ($20 per year) that finds and fixes these problems just as it did for the children in this study.  Debix is the only child product that continuously monitors the three credit bureaus and ChoicePoint, along with utilities and other public databases for abuse of your children’s identities. Most importantly we also provide the same insurance and restoration services that we do for adults so that should something happen you and your children are fully protected.

See how it compares to the competition.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 6:36 pm by mortman and is filed under child victims, news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.