Back To School Identity Theft
We have been learning more and more about identity thieves taking advantage of back to school season. People are usually insuring that they protect their business, employees and customers from the exploitation of confidential data, but what we don’t realize is that our children are at a great risk to this as well.
Here are some statistics to put this into perspective:
- Children are being targeted for identity theft 35 times more often than adults.
- Surveys have shown that for every 27,000 children in the US, there were 3000 experienced cases of identity theft.
- The percentage of identity theft victims under 5 years of age have doubled since the previous year leading to an increase of 105%.
- Credit reports do not detect 99% of identity theft cases for children.
We suggest taking the time to talk to remind your children at back to school time how you are protecting them from identity theft and what they can do to participate as well. Some recommendations are:
- Developing and communicating a family plan to protect yourselves from being victims of fraud.
- Shredding all confidential documents that are not in use.
- Protecting your children both online and offline.
- Teaching your children about the importance of protecting their social insurance number.
- Awareness.
Statistics from the “Child Identity Theft Report 2012” by AllClear ID.
To learn more about protecting your children go to: https://www.allclearid.com/themes/allclearid/docs/ChildIDTheftReport2012.pdf