Do Your Homework on Child Identity Theft

With summer winding down, it’s time to get the kids ready to go back to school. While parents are shopping for supplies and kids are hoping to be in class with their best friends, school administrators are doing their best to ensure schools provide a safe learning environment for students. But what is being done to protect your child’s personal information?

Schools and school systems have a lot of personal information about your children – full legal name, birth date, home address, medical records, even Social Security numbers. This makes them susceptible to data breaches; the Identity Theft Resource Center reported 98 breaches in the educational sector in 2016, exposing more than one million records. As of this July, 90 educational sector breaches have been reported this year. Not all breaches expose student records; however, these incidents do point to the vulnerabilities in schools’ cyber infrastructures.

It’s not that schools and school systems mean to be negligent in protecting student records; most simply have a number of priorities that need to be addressed with a limited budget. Spending money to better secure the personal information of students and employees likely means a reduction in spending elsewhere. And while improved security measures can reduce a number of vulnerabilities, breaches often happen as a result of human actions, such as clicking on a link in an email, leaving laptops and hard drives unsecured, or accidentally sending files to the wrong person. No organization is immune to human error.

Parents, 

Take Notes Children’s personal information, especially Social Security numbers (SSN), is considered valuable to hackers because their identities offer a clean slate. Children do not have credit reports, so someone can use their identity for years without being detected. That’s why it’s important that parents do their due diligence by limiting who has access to their child’s personal information.

Think about all the places besides schools that ask for your school-age child’s information, including an SSN: summer camp, the pediatrician’s office, after-school and sports programs, scholarship providers, etc. The important thing for parents to know is that just because an organization asks for your child’s information, you are under no obligation to provide it. The only organization that really needs your child’s SSN is the government, for tax filing purposes and to receive any government benefits. If someone insists on having the information, ask them specifically why it is needed, how it will be protected, and what happens to it when they no longer need it. Educational breaches can expose student records that have been on file for years.

As your child gets older and starts looking for a summer job, advise him or her not to provide their SSN until they have been hired, or an employer needs to run a background check. They do not need to include it on online or paper applications. If they attend college, they will need to provide their SSN, and perhaps the parents’ as well, as they apply for financial aid. In addition to organizations, parents should be very careful about limiting the number of individuals who have access to their child’s personal information. Kroll Investigators have worked a number of child identity theft cases that involve a family member using the child’s information to obtain credit or secure employment.

A service of the Investigators of Kroll. These materials are derived from the research and discovery activities of Kroll Fraud Specialists and Licensed Investigators, and have been gathered from personal, historical, and aggregated experience performing specialized restoration services on behalf of Identity Theft victims. While believed to be accurate, these materials do not constitute legal advice, and are not guaranteed to be correct, complete or up-to-date. No part of this document may be reproduced, transmitted, transcribed, stored in a retrieval system, or translated into a language or computer language, in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, optical, chemical, manual or otherwise, without the express written consent of Kroll. These materials are provided for informational purposes only.