This post brought to you by Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. The content and opinions expressed below are that of Trippin’ with Tara.
You would think now having two teenage daughters, I have done all I can do up until this point to protect them. In the beginning of their lives I made my home baby safe, covering outlets and putting on those cabinet locks. Then as time continued on, we talked about strangers, how to handle situations that made them feel uncomfortable, and even arming them with cell phones in case of an emergency.
I admit, I didn’t spend much time until now thinking about the importance of protecting not only them, but who they are. I was shocked to learn recently there are more than 50,000 children in Florida alone that become victims of identity theft each year. Fifty thousand. That is a lot of kids. And to know that identity thieves target kids because they generally have clean credit histories, and years will pass before the crime is detected. Years. It’s never too early to Protect Your Child’s Identity .
So I found out about the new Florida law that allows parents to easily set up credit records for their children and then they can freeze them. By doing this, thieves are then blocked from using a child’s personal information to open a credit card, mortgage or other financial account. So by freezing your child’s credit, you are protecting them by blocking others from using it.
Protect Your Kids from Identity Theft
Creating a credit report for your child is easy. First you need to contact the following credit reporting agencies: Equifax, Experian and Trans Union. Details on the documents these agencies will need and sample letters are available at www.FreshFromFlorida.com/ProtectYourChild. The fee to freeze your child’s credit is $10 per agency, or waived if your child is already a victim of identity theft. Any parent or legal guardian of minors up to 16-years-old may sign up their child. The freeze lasts until the parent contacts the credit bureau to remove the freeze, or until the child reaches adulthood and asks for the freeze to be removed.
Seems easy enough right? I know that to Protect Your Child’s Identity has had me do some research. If you have kids, this is something you too should look at, it’s a small price to pay, especially considering how many hundreds of dollars I spent on those outlet protector and cabinet locks, this is nothing and offers a protection that could do equally as much damage.
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I’m on a crusade fighting the same fight. I’m just working it from a different direction. I would like to link up to find out how we can help promote this effort.
What are you thinking?
It sucks to have your identity stolen before you’ve even started out in life. This is definitely something to look into. I guess my only concern is once you give an agency your child’s social security number to protect it, what if they are hacked all those numbers are stolen…so then your kids number is floating out there and can potentially be used as apposed to never being even written on anything before. I’m nervous about that….and then if the agency fails to protect your child against said threat, do they have the ability to wipe the child’s credit clean and give them a new identity?