Child ID theft: how to teach your child self-defence against identity theft.

• Author: Koch, Gary

Send a shredder to college. No kidding. No one is too young to be a target for identity thieves.

A survey by the Federal Trade Commission found that nearly 10 million Americans discovered they were identity theft victims last year, and the total cost of this crime was $50 billion.

Children can become victims even while still too young to get credit cards or apply for loans or jobs. Many do not discover they are victims until years or decades later, when applying for student loans or other credit and finding someone else has established, and ruined, credit in their names. Identity thieves may also steal a child's identity to commit other crimes, such as giving another person's identity to police at a traffic stop or during an arrest.

Using identities stolen from wallets (the most fertile source for identity thieves), credit card receipts and the mail, thieves run up credit card bills, take out loans and buy real estate and vehicles, leaving victims to pay off the fraudulent charges and clean up the mess. Victims may not discover the fraud until collection agencies seek payment on delinquent accounts they don't know they have. Reestablishing credit can cost up to thousands of dollars and require hundreds of hours spent making phone calls and writing letters.

Identity thieves divert victims' mail to their own addresses, set up services to authenticate information on credit applications, even add themselves to victims' accounts. They can find out personal information easily by stealing receipts or bills from the trash, faking telemarketing calls to obtain information over the phone, hacking into financial information on computer networks or bribing employees of credit card or rating services for information.

Young people are particularly vulnerable from the beginning. Identity thieves may snatch names from newspaper birth announcements and apply for Social Security cards in children's names. Although they grow up with password-protected Internet access, personal identification numbers (PINs) and other safeguards that their elders never needed to learn about at the same age, young people can also be naive and overly trusting. They may leave checkbooks, credit cards or mail lying around school lockers, college dorm rooms or shared apartments, for example, providing identity thieves easy access to their finances.

The Internet is often blamed for exploding identity theft rates, but it more often begins with a lost or stolen wallet, checkbook or...