If you are a parent, the last thing you may be concerned about is the theft of your child’s ID information since it may never occur to you that anyone is out to steal your child’s identity.
Unfortunately, however, it has become increasingly common for criminals to target children and to take their Social Security numbers or other personal details. These identity thieves, who take child ID information, may then use the child’s details to apply for credit, take out a loan, or otherwise do things they shouldn’t. This can leave the child with a damaged or destroyed credit score before he or she is even old enough to get credit.

Three Reasons to Protect Your Child’s Identity

There are literally countless reasons why parents may wish to protect the private identities of their children by making use of a service such as IDENTITY GUARD® to help them to keep their kid’s precious identity safe. However, three of the best and most important reasons for using a service like IDENTITY GUARD® are listed below.

  1. Child identity theft often doesn’t come to light until a child identity thief has done significant damage. Kids normally do not check their credit regularly and do not apply for credit. This means that it could be weeks, months, or years before you realize that your child’s identity has been stolen. During this time, the identity thief could charge thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of items. The child’s credit could be completely destroyed by dozens of loans and judgments against him or her. While the misinformation caused by identity theft usually can be corrected, it can be very time consuming to do this. In the meantime, your child may experience adverse effects such as having a hard time getting student loans because of bad credit. During the time it takes to sort things out, your child could lose out on important opportunities.
  2. Identity theft is about more than just stealing money. Thieves could do other things with your child’s name than just apply for loans. For example, someone could get medical care in your child’s name. If the medical care shows up on your child’s medical records, this could put your child in danger due to inaccurate information on his or her medical history.
  3. Child identity theft can be difficult to fix. With any type of identity theft, it can be very time consuming and can take dozens of hours to resolve the issue. Your child won’t be able to do everything necessary to resolve the problems created by child ID theft, so the responsibility will likely fall to you. 

These are just three reasons why it is important to be proactive in stopping child ID theft. With IDENTITY GUARD® or with targeted programs to help fight child ID theft such as kID SureSM, you can take steps to do everything possible to prevent your child from having his or her identity stolen. This is just one more way that you, as a parent, can protect the interests of your kids and work to keep them safe from harm.



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