The Federal Trade Commission has several publications regarding identity theft and one of their most recent publications (May 2012) titled “Safeguarding Your Child’s Future”.  I highly recommend reading this publication in order to increase your awareness of the warning signs risk and mitigations they recommend. It talks about the steps we take to protect our children from all types of other risks but how little attention we pay to protecting their identity. Child identity theft is on the rise. Children are great targets for attackers for identity theft because it is rare that parents will be checking the credit reports for their younger children.  This means that it may take years before the identity theft is known about and  may only be discovered when that child has reached a point where they are applying for loan, apartment or a job. This gives the attacker years of low risk use for the stolen identity.

 

Prevention

There lots of actions a parent can take to monitor and prevent identity theft for children. A good site to look at where several mechanisms are called out is OnGuardOnline.