The theft of children’s identities is a growing segment of identity theft. The terrifying thing about this type of crime is that it often goes undetected until the child tries to apply for credit as an adult or tries to get a loan for college, and by then, the child’s credit is ruined.
The identity information of children is a hot commodity on the black market because they come without a credit report attached, which makes them ideal for identity theft. And if the thief is “lucky,” he can use the information for many years.
But the Social Security Administration and the Department of Justice have been recently issued the challenge of creating a tool for credit issuers to use to assess whether a Social Security number belongs to a minor. The database, as proposed, would contain the name, Social Security number, and month and year of birth of every child ages birth to 17 years, 10 months.
The idea was first proposed in 2005, but with the ever-increasing incidents of child identity theft, the idea has gained more traction.
The Social Security Administration’s Death Master File has been cited as a precedent for the database. The file is a list of everyone with a SSN who has passed away. It’s distributed to the three major credit reporting bureaus so that they can mark credit reports “deceased.”
But the new database won’t happen overnight. There are some legal hoops to jump through first, due to the Patriot Act. Furthermore, the database would have to be extremely secure, and available only to entities in exchange for their assurances of certain security levels and safeguards.
