Identity thieves are targeting babies and unborn children for credit fraud

What type coward, a**hole, sh*t is THIS????

Parents struggling to keep track of their kids’ vaccinations, homework, dance classes and veggie intake have precious little time for other worries, but a serious new threat is demanding their attention: Identity thieves are increasingly targeting children, in some cases stealing their identities even before they are born.

As an investigation by NBC’s Jeff Rossen and TODAY revealed Thursday, criminals routinely use a child’s pristine credit record to their advantage and get away with it for years or decades — even if law enforcement knows exactly where the imposters live. TODAY showed this in dramatic fashion, hunting down two alleged child imposters and capturing their comments on camera.

Rossen’s story on TODAY also features a 9-year-old girl who is in default on utility bills, a teenager with $750,000 in debt, and a 2-year-old with a pile of credit card bills.

“You think this must be a joke, and then you realize, no this is actually incredibly serious,” said Allison, the baby’s mom, who asked that her last name be withheld. “Never in my wildest dreams had I thought to run a credit check on my son. And what parent would run a credit check on their child who’s in diapers, who’s crawling?”

TODAY’s story follows a piece on msnbc.com’s Red Tape Chronicles last month that unearthed research showing child ID theft is more common than previously believed. Hard data is difficult to find, because most cases of child ID theft aren’t discovered for years, but a recent check of 40,000 children by identity monitoring company Debix found more than 4,000 cases of tainted identities.

The issue for parents is this: What can I do to protect my child?

While the problem is clear, the solution is less so. The vast majority of kids don’t have a credit report, and they shouldn’t. In general, the Federal Trade Commission, the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center and the nation’s credit bureaus advise against frequently checking your kids’ credit unless there’s some reason to believe they’ve been victimized by identity theft. Repeated requests for a child’s report can actually do more harm than good. The Identity Theft Resource Center warns that it can lead to the premature creation of a credit file, which could make it easier for an ID thief to exploit the child’s identity.

Experts give this advice for parents seeking to protect their children:

Jay Foley, executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center, says parents don’t need to panic over evidence of identity theft, but they should realize they are facing an uphill battle. Obtaining information on SSN-only ID theft can be tricky.

“Unless the child is being chased by collection agencies, my suggestion is to wait until the child is 16 years old and then the parents need to write a letter to the credit reporting agencies requesting any information on the child’s name in combination with the SSN and any information on the SSN alone,” he said. “If at that time they find something wrong we have roughly two years (in most cases) to get it fixed or replaced.”

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