The Most Dangerous Myth in Child Identity Fraud

It is the most common thing I hear from parents, and it is the belief that leaves more children exposed than any other. My child is too young to be a target. There is nothing to steal. No money, no accounts, no credit. Why would anyone want a five-year-old's information?

I understand the logic completely, however it is also exactly backward. A child is the perfect target.

Why young is the point

A criminal is not after a child's bank account, because there isn't one. They are after a clean, untouched Social Security number with no history attached and no credit activity to raise suspicion. To someone building fraudulent or synthetic credit, that blank slate is the entire prize because a child's number comes with years of silence.

From a fraudsters point of view, that silence is the perfect condition. The younger the child, the newer the social security number, the longer the runway. 

This is not a fringe theory. Doug Levin, who leads the K-12 cybersecurity exchange K12 SIX, told CBS News in August 2024 that young students are desirable targets precisely because their credit records go unmonitored and can be exploited for years. He has described seeing children as young as first grade have their identities compromised. The people who study this agree on who the target is. It is the youngest among us.

Why no one finds out for years

The second half of the myth is the belief that if something happened, a parent would know. Unfortunately, the fraud does not announce itself. It accrues in silence and often surfaces when the child becomes an adult and applies for a first loan, a first apartment, or a first job, and discovers the damage was done years earlier.

The takeaway

The good news is that the same fact that makes a young child the perfect target also makes them the easiest to protect, if you act early. Freezing a child's Social Security number secures it before it can ever be used, no matter how young they are and no matter where their number ends up. You do not have to wait until they are old enough to be at risk. They already are.