Study finds 140,000 children are victims of identity theft each year

San Diego, CA, United States (AHN) – While children are less at risk for identity fraud than adults, it does occur and can be much more devastating because the fraudulent activity can go undetected for years. After such a long time restoring the victim’s good name and credit rating is even that much harder to do.

A new study from ID ANALYTICS found that a startling 140,000 identity frauds are perpetrated on minors each year.

• Credit card and wireless activity most common—60 percent of the potential fraudulent identity use alerts sent to minors originated from the credit card industry. The vast majority of the remaining alerts were from the telecommunications industry, mostly wireless providers.

• Minors who received an alert through the study were seven times more likely to experience fraud than an adult. They received 0.5 percent of the identity use alerts, but yielded 3.5 percent of the cases of fraud.

“Child identity fraud poses complex challenges to consumers, businesses and regulators. Unfortunately, minors’ identities are particularly appealing to fraudsters because their personal data is untainted, legitimatet and less likely to be monitored for misuse,” said Tom Oscherwitz, chief privacy officer at ID Analytics.

Analysts believe that child identity fraud is more than a hypothetical risk. Well over 140,000 U.S. kids are victims of the crime currently.

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