Minors are often targets of identity theft if unmonitored

Zach Friesen became the poster child for ID theft when at 17 he applied for a job and a school loan and discovered he was in debt for a $40,000 houseboat.

Someone had stolen his identity when he was only 7.

Now 21 and a political science student at the University of Colorado, Friesen also works for Qwest Communications’ Incredible Internet Program spreading the “Beware child ID theft” gospel to teens, parents, legislators and others who need to know.

When someone steals your identity, you don’t walk around in a daze like an amnesic John or Jane Doe. Instead, crooks take your personal information – Social Security number, driver’s license, address and other identifying information – and use it to open accounts, make purchases or siphon money from accounts.

Catching the culprit and cleaning up corrupted credit could take years. Meanwhile, the mess can stand in the way of obtaining credit, insurance, a job or a home.

Friesen says, in the latest spin on ID theft, children have become easy targets for a host of reasons.

Few people assume a child has a credit record, perhaps rightfully so. Most kids don’t have a record unless someone gets a hold of their Social Security number or other information and goes shopping with the clean slate of a perfect credit record. Because of the assumption, however, a kid’s credit record is rarely checked, and it becomes easy to get away with the crime for long periods of time before discovery.

Kids are also exposed during popular social networking activities on the Internet. In their naiveté, younger people are too often willing to give out information that can be used for fraud.

Advocacy group, the Identity Theft Resource Center, says half the cases of ID theft involve relatives pilfering identities because of their easy access to children’s personal information.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, some 400,000 kids 18 or younger have their IDs stolen each year.

Fortunately, children have the same protections adults should use to protect their identity.

It starts with free annual access to a child’s credit reports, available from the big three credit reporting agencies Equifax, Experian and TransUnion – the federally sanctioned Annual Credit Report. You get one report free from each agency every year. Getting one free from a different company every four months is a good idea to spread over time your credit report monitoring.

The Social Security number assigned at birth could be enough to trigger the creation of a credit report, say some consumer experts. Most children won’t get a credit report, until, say, a parent’s credit card account is used to issue a card in the child’s name, a child co-signs for a auto or other loan, or perhaps if an older teen manages to secure a gas, retail or other merchant card. Youth employment, a rental application or other activities that warrant a credit check could also generate an initial credit report.

If a child spends a lot of time online in chat rooms, social networking sites or other information-gathering and sharing sites, parents checking for a credit report isn’t a bad idea, if only to determine a credit report doesn’t exist or that there is no suspicious activity.

Another tool is a no- or low-cost credit freeze that blocks requests for credit – a particularly useful tool for kids who typically don’t need credit until they are young adults. In California, you must contact each individual credit agency to apply a freeze on each report. It’s free if you are already an ID-theft victim. Otherwise pay $10 to invoke, temporarily remove or permanently remove the freeze.

Also, for kids who become ID theft victims and generate a police report, parents can, for free, call any one of the three credit bureaus and have a fraud alert placed on the credit report to help prevent future infractions while sorting out the mess.