Kids can be easy prey for identity thieves

This is an interesting story.
It happened to someone I know of, and it was the parents who ran up the debt.

NEW YORK — Among the people Linda Foley is currently working to help are a 3-year-old whose Social Security number is being used by someone for work purposes. And there’s a 5-year-old whose identity is linked to driver’s licenses, arrest warrants for drunken driving, and a warrant for unpaid child support.

These stories may sound unusual, but Foley has heard of many such situations since she started the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center in 1999, and she’s convinced that the poaching of children’s identities is more common than anyone knows.

Because identity theft is typically associated with financial matters like the misuse of credit cards, most people don’t consider the possibility that their child’s personal information could be stolen and misused. But more than 34,000 reports of identity theft reported to the Federal Trade Commission from 2005 to 2007 concerned children under age 18.

“I think we just see the tip of the iceberg, we don’t know how deep this problem goes,” says Foley.

One reason there is no clear figure for the number of children affected is that the crime often goes unnoticed for many years, explains Scott Mitic, chief executive of TrustedID, a Redwood, Calif., company that offers ID protection services.

Usually, there’s a narrow time gap between the discovery and the theft, Mitic says of identity theft in general. “But in this age group, you’re much more likely to see a lag.”

Because children don’t have complex financial lives, there is less opportunity to notice that something has gone awry than for adults who try to access loans, mortgages and credit cards — one major factor that plays into child identity theft going undetected for years.

A second major reason is that frequently, the thief is a parent or other relative of the child.

“In excess of 50 percent of all child ID theft, involves a perpetrator who is one of the parents or someone who is close to the family,” estimates Foley, basing her figure on counseling experience and work with law enforcement agencies.

That was the case for Randy Waldron Jr., now 27, who has spent the last decade trying to clean up his reputation.

“My father began using my Social Security number in 1982,” says Waldron. But his father was not a part of his life as a child, and it wasn’t until 16 years later, when Waldron was applying for college, that it was discovered he had run up a total of $22.5 million in debt in his son’s name.

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