An 8 year old is in foreclosure on a home in another state. A three-year-old is being sent to collection for a huge utility bill.
Identity theft among children is on the rise, according to a report by Carnegie Mellon CyLab.
Based on scans of over 42,000 U.S child IDs by Debix, an identity protection company, the report offers these key findings:
- 4,311 or 10.2 percent of the children in the report had someone else using their Social Security number.
- Child IDs were used to purchase homes and automobiles, open credit card accounts, secure employment, and obtain driver’s licenses.
- The largest fraud – $725,000 – was committed against a 16-year-old girl.
- The youngest victim was 5 months old; 303 victims were under the age 5.
“From my perspective, having tracked the evolution of cyber crime over two decades, it is only common sense to surmise that the problem goes beyond those breached accounts included in this report, and that there are many thousands more children and their families at risk,” Richard Powers, author of the report and director of strategic communications for CyLab, said.
Powers is author of the book “Secrets Stolen, Fortunes Lost: Preventing Economic Espionage and Intellectual Property Theft in the 21st Century.”
For more information, see Child Identity Theft: New Evidence Indicates Identity Thieves are Targeting Children for Unused Social Security Numbers.
